But if the warriors were glad to see him, little Nkima was frantic with joy. He scrambled quickly over the bodies of the kneeling blacks and leaped to Tarzan's shoulder, where he clung about his neck, jabbering excitedly.
'You have done well, my children,' said the ape-man, 'and little Nkima has done well. He bore my message to you, and I find you ready where I had planned that you should be.'
'We have kept always a day's march ahead of the strangers, Bwana,' replied Muviro, 'camping well off the trail that they might not discover our fresh camp sites and become suspicious.'
'They do not suspect your presence,' said Tarzan. 'I listened above their camp last night, and they said nothing that would indicate that they dreamed that another party was preceding them along the trail.'
'Where the dirt of the trail was soft a warrior, who marched at the rear of the column, brushed away the freshness of our spoor with a leafy bough,' explained Muviro.
'Tomorrow we shall wait here for them,' said the apeman, 'and tonight you shall listen to Tarzan while he explains the plans that you will follow.'
As Zveri's column took up the march upon the following morning, after a night of rest that had passed without incident, the spirits of all had risen to an appreciable degree. The blacks had not forgotten the grim warning that had sped out of the night surrounding their previous camp, but they were of a race whose spirits soon rebound from depression.
The leaders of the expedition were encouraged by the knowledge that over a third of the distance to their goal had been covered. For various reasons they were anxious to complete this part of the plan. Zveri believed that upon its successful conclusion hinged his whole dream of empire. Ivitch, a natural born trouble-maker, was happy in the thought that the success of the expedition would cause untold annoyance to millions of people and perhaps, also, by the dream of his return to Russia as a hero; perhaps a wealthy hero.
Romero and Mori wanted to have it over for entirely different reasons. They were thoroughly disgusted with the Russian. They had lost all confidence in the sincerity of Zveri, who, filled as he was with his own importance and his delusions of future grandeur, talked too much, with the result that he had convinced Romero that he and all his kind were frauds, bent upon accomplishing their selfish ends with the assistance of their silly dupes and at the expense of the peace and prosperity of the world. It had not been difficult for Romero to convince Mori of the truth of his deductions, and now, thoroughly disillusioned, the two men continued on with the expedition because they believed that they could not successfully accomplish their intended desertion until the party was once more settled in the base camp.
The march had continued uninterruptedly for about an hour after camp had been broken, when one of Kitembo's black scouts, leading the column, halted suddenly in his tracks.
'Look!' he said to Kitembo, who was just behind him.
The chief stepped to the warrior's side; and there, before him in the trail, sticking upright in the earth, was an arrow.
'It is a warning,' said the warrior.
Gingerly, Kitembo plucked the arrow from the earth and examined it. He would have been glad to have kept the knowledge of his discovery to himself, although not a little shaken by what he had seen; but the warrior at his side had seen, too. 'It is the same,' he said. 'It is another of the arrows that were left behind in the base camp.'
When Zveri came abreast of them, Kitembo handed him the arrow. 'It is the same,' he said to the Russian, 'and it is a warning for us to turn back.'
'Pooh!' exclaimed Zveri contemptuously. 'It is only an arrow sticking in the dirt and cannot stop a column of armed men. I did not think that you were a coward, too, Kitembo.'
The black scowled. 'Nor do men with safety call me a coward,' he snapped; 'but neither am I a fool, and better than you do I know the danger signals of the forest. We shall go on because we are brave men, but many will never come back. Also, your plans will fail.'
At this Zveri flew into one of his frequent rages; and though the men continued the march, they were in a sullen mood, and many were the ugly glances that were cast at Zveri and his lieutenants.
Shortly after noon the expedition halted for the noonday rest. They had been passing through a dense woods, gloomy and depressing; and there was neither song nor laughter, nor a great deal of conversation, as the men squatted together in little knots while they devoured the cold food that constituted their midday meal.
Suddenly, from somewhere far above, a voice floated down to them. Weird and uncanny, it spoke to them in a Bantu dialect that most of them could understand. 'Turn back, children of Mulungu,' it cried. 'Turn back before you die. Desert the white men before it is too late.'
That was all. The men crouched fearfully, looking up into the trees. It was Zveri who broke the silence. 'What the hell was that?' he demanded. 'What did it say?'
'It warned us to turn back,' said Kitembo.
'There will be no turning back,' snapped Zveri.
'I do not know about that,' replied Kitembo.
'I thought you wanted to be a king,' cried Zveri. 'You'd make a hell of a king.'
For the moment Kitembo had forgotten the dazzling prize that Zveri had held before his eyes for months-to the king of Kenya. That was worth risking much for.
'We will go on,' he said.
'You may have to use force,' said Zveri, 'but stop at nothing. We must go on, no matter what happens,' and then he turned to his other lieutenants. 'Romero, you and Mori go to the rear of the column and shoot every man who refuses to advance.'
The men had not as yet refused to go on, and when the order to march was given, they sullenly took their places in the column. For an hour they marched thus; and then, far ahead, came the weird cry that many of them had heard before at Opar, and a few minutes later a voice out of the distance called to them. 'Desert the white men,' it said.
The blacks whispered among themselves, and it was evident that trouble was brewing; but Kitembo managed to persuade them to continue the march, a thing that Zveri never could have accomplished.
'I wish we could get that trouble-maker,' said Zveri to Zora Drinov, as the two walked together near the head of the column. 'If he would only show himself once, so that we could get a shot at him; that's all I want.'
'It is someone familiar with the workings of the native mind,' said the girl. 'Probably a medicine man of some tribe through whose territory we are marching.'
'I hope that it is nothing more than that,' replied Zveri. 'I have no doubt that the man is a native, but I am afraid that he is acting on instructions from either the British or the Italians, who hope thus to disorganize and delay us until they can mobilize a force with which to attack us.'
'It has certainly shaken the morale of the men,' said Zora, 'for I believe that they attribute all of the weird happenings, from the mysterious death of Jafar to the present time, to the same agency, to which their superstitious minds naturally attribute a supernatural origin.'
'So much the worse for them, then,' said Zveri, 'for they are going on whether they wish to or not; and when they find that attempted desertion means death, they will wake up to the fact that it is not safe to trifle with Peter Zveri.'
'They are many, Peter,' the girl reminded him, 'and we are few; in addition they are, thanks to you, well armed. It seems to me that you may have created a Frankenstein that will destroy us all in the end.'
'You are as bad as the blacks,' growled Zveri, 'making a mountain out of a mole hill. Why if I-'
Behind the rear of the column and again apparently from the air above them sounded the warning voice. 'Desert the whites.' Silence fell again upon the marching column, but the men moved on, exhorted by Kitembo and threatened by the revolvers of their white officers.
Presently the forest broke at the edge of a small plain, across which the trail led through buffalo grass that grew high above the heads of the marching men. They were well into this when, ahead of them, a rifle spoke, and then another and another, seemingly in a long line across their front.
Zveri ordered one of the blacks to rush Zora to the rear of the column into a position of safety, while he followed close behind her, ostensibly searching for Romero and shouting words of encouragement to the men.
As yet no one had been hit; but the column had stopped, and the men were rapidly losing all semblance of