But whether the African be savage bushman or cultivated Moslem gentleman, superstition is part of the very marrow in his backbone. These men had felt the bullets, they had felt the infernal burnings of the benzoline, but they were wound up now to a pitch above dreading either. Orders were given to concentrate in the edge of the bush, as near to the clearing as they could get without being sighted from the factory, and then when all was ready the monkey-skin drums would beat the charge.
The first comers peered through the outer fringe of the cover, and saw the clearing desolate, and the factory buildings to all appearance tenantless. The dead that they had left in their hurried retreat still lay where they had dropped, and glared up glassy stares at the outrageous sun. But with eyes keen to pick up any hint at ju-ju charm, the gaze of all this vanguard fell on five little wooden mannikins set opposite the points where the several bush roads cut into the open.
There was nothing new about the mannikins themselves. They were merely the things that their own uncles and their grandfathers carved for a purpose which they themselves knew better than did that tricky white man with the red head who had doubtless put them there. But then each of these mannikins was perched on a pedestal made of one or more green gin cases, and that in itself looked suspicious--or, in other words, smacked of ju-ju. And, moreover, each was garlanded with those infernal green cylinders which they had just been informed officially were in truth not orthodox ju-ju, but which they knew from their own painful experience could, upon occasion, vomit forth the most horrible flames.
They crouched in the edge of the cover once more thoroughly shaken, and it only required the final portent to fray their courage utterly.
In the factory, tucked snugly out of sight in the mess-room, Laura Slade, Carter and White-Man's Trouble lay stretched out wearily upon the floor. A length of match boarding had been stripped away from the wall, and only a paling of vertical bamboos stood between them and the external world.
It was the code message of the monkey-skin drums, as read by White-Man's-Trouble, that first gave them the news that the Okky-men had rewound up their courage and were returning once more to the attack; and so they promptly retired out of sight. Guns and defenders would have been a reassuring touch to the enemy, who had seen such things before. But for them to find no guns, and no human beings in view, would accentuate the effect of the graven images which gazed woodenly upon them from the green gin-box pedestals.
