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warriors who seemed to be but waiting some slight pretext to transfix him with
their menacing spears the Russian could do naught else than withdraw.
A dozen fighting men led him to the edge of the clearing, leaving him with a
warning never to show himself again in the vicinity of their village.
Stifling his anger, Paulvitch slunk into the jungle; but once beyond the sight of
the warriors he paused and listened intently. He could hear the voices of his
escort as the men returned to the village, and when he was sure that they were
not following him he wormed his way through the bushes to the edge of the river,
still determined some way to obtain a canoe.
Life itself depended upon his reaching the Kincaid and enlisting the survivors of
the ship's crew in his service, for to be abandoned here amidst the dangers of the
African jungle where he had won the enmity of the natives was, he well knew,
practically equivalent to a sentence of death.
A desire for revenge acted as an almost equally powerful incentive to spur him
into the face of danger to accomplish his design, so that it was a desperate man
that lay hidden in the foliage beside the little river searching with eager eyes for
some sign of a small canoe which might be easily handled by a single paddle.
Nor had the Russian long to wait before one of the awkward little skiffs which the
Mosula fashion came in sight upon the bosom of the river. A youth was paddling
lazily out into midstream from a point beside the village. When he reached the
channel he allowed the sluggish current to carry him slowly along while he lolled
indolently in the bottom of his crude canoe.
All ignorant of the unseen enemy upon the river's bank the lad floated slowly
down the stream while Paulvitch followed along the jungle path a few yards
behind him.
A mile below the village the black boy dipped his paddle into the water and forced
his skiff toward the bank. Paulvitch, elated by the chance which had drawn the
youth to the same side of the river as that along
which he followed rather than to the opposite side where he would have been
beyond the stalker's reach, hid in the brush close beside the point at which it was
evident the skiff would touch the bank of the slow-moving stream, which seemed
jealous of each fleeting instant which drew it nearer to the broad and muddy
Ugambi where it must for ever lose its identity in the larger stream that would
presently cast its waters into the great ocean.
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