Here the eager crowd outside showed signs of storming the tent, and Dane was forced to take his leave, reflecting that it might perhaps be as well if they did not, as Miss Castro expected, meet in Africa. Rejoining Maxwell, he told him what he had heard, concluding:
"It much resembled the usual professional soothsayer's medley, and I could make neither head nor tail of it. Still, the señorita's manner impressed me."
"How did she look or speak?" Maxwell's glance betrayed his interest.
"As though she believed what she was saying, and wished me to."
"I am inclined to think she did," Maxwell answered thoughtfully. "She was also probably giving you good advice in the one way available. How she knows I cannot tell, but by the light of past experience I can make a good deal of the medley. As you probably surmised, her warning was not the result of divination."
Maxwell did not appear inclined to answer questions, and, dismissing the subject, they proceeded to make the most of their last few hours upon what he termed Christian soil. The black peaks were fading against the saffron in the west, and purple darkness creeping up from Africa across the sea, when the mail gun warned them it was time to return to the steamer.
"We shall have seen, and perhaps suffered, very strange things before we set foot in a civilized land again," said Maxwell. "It is not a tropical sporting trip that we are embarking upon. There remain just five minutes for a valedictory libation."
"Champagne!" Dane said to the Swiss attendant as they passed through the veranda of the hotel; and presently he rose from a little table, holding up the sparkling cup. Maxwell's hints had impressed him, and there was a grimness behind his smile when he spoke.
"Here's death or glory! A swift journey to the heart of the forest!"
Maxwell generally frowned upon anything that approached the theatrical, but, as he touched his comrade's glass with his own, his face was grave.
"Heaven send us both back safe out of it and--because the one implies the other--confound the cross-marked man!"
Dane asked no questions. Maxwell was always slightly oracular, and might not have answered them; and a few minutes later they were being rowed off to the steamer in company with Dom Pedro Castro.