The Strand Magazine.
By Tammers' Camp Fires.—II
By K. and Hesketh Prichard.
TAMMERS AND THE CANNIBAL
I.
"I DON'T want to go any farther," I said.
Tammers rubbed the quarter-inch of stubble that always on active service decorated his bullet-head, and glanced anxiously round on the park-like loveliness of the scene amid which we were encamped on the edge of a plateau that lies near the heart of Africa, whither we had gone trading and hunting.
"Why?" he asked. "Can't beat the landscape, you know."
"No one could quarrel with that," I admitted; then added the naked truth, "But I am very much frightened."
"Frightened?" echoed Tammers, in surprise. "What of?"
"Ruora," I replied, shortly. "He is a cannibal, and"
Tammers brought an open mind to the consideration of every question.
"You mustn't judge cannibals in the bunch," he urged; "I've known one or two gentlemanly cannibals in my time."
"I dare say. But Ruora has a reputation."
"That's so," said Tammers. "But Ruora's got a bowlful of diamonds, too. I'd like to trade some of those diamonds, Anson. They'd help us, you see, and they're of no use to a savage."
"How can we be certain that he has them?" I objected. "How comes a savage up here, a couple of thousand miles from the mines, to possess diamonds?"
"It's queer, but it's a fact. I made sure of that," Tammers replied. "They've passed from hand to hand in a way we mightn't like to hear. You know that niggers, who go down to the Kimberley mines, always try to smuggle away a diamond as a present to their own chief when they return home. So gradually a little lot of diamonds gets collected. Then another chief comes down and raids the lot, and so on. These diamonds have been ten years on the move, they told me. Now Ruora has them. I hear he thinks a good deal of those diamonds. It's a toss-up between them and a coloured sixpenny part of a ladies' fashion paper which he thinks most of."
"If that is the case, where shall we come in? How are we two to get a bowlful of diamonds from fifteen hundred savages who live in the centre of Africa?"
"Boldness is the only course," said Tammers with conviction.
"There's prudence," I suggested.
I am a timid man—as timid a man, I suppose, as ever went venturing into Africa or partnered with one so daring and resourceful as my friend Tammers. I had always preferred to keep on the conventional side of the fence. Yet Tammers had a way of listening to my advice with a deference which, I fear, it did not invariably deserve. He nodded gravely at my mention of prudence, and broke off on what seemed a side-issue.
"Early this morning, while you were asleep, I climbed that big tree over there," he said.
I waited to hear more.
"I saw some glittering points of light coming up from the south-west."
"Savages on the move?"
"Yes; I think the spears of Ruora's men."
"All the more reason for us to decamp—while we can." I was rather pleased that, for once, my counsels of caution should be justified by events. Tammers' bold strokes so often proved themselves to be irresistibly, irrefutably right.
"While I was in that tree," he continued,
