"Good-bye, and good luck," said the agent, and he told his subordinates at supper that night that another good, keen man had gone off to disappear in Africa.
But Carter was developing into one of those tough, tactful fellows that people call lucky because they always seem to succeed in whatever they set a hand to. When the flood tide was under her, the launch coughed her way up the great beer-colored river at a rate that sometimes touched ten knots to the hour. She added her own scents of half-burned paraffin and scorched lubricating oil to the crushed-marigold odor of the water, and disgusted all the crocodiles who pushed up their ugly snouts to see what came between the wind and their nobility. On the ebb she still hauled up past the mangroves at a good steady two miles every hour.
The engine, with rational treatment, seemed a very decent sort of machine, though the feathering propeller, even till its final days, was always liable to moods of uncertainty, and after twenty-four hours of sending the launch ahead, would without any warning suddenly begin to pull her astern. Still these erratic moods always yielded to treatment, and, considering that she had been bought without a rag of reputation, Carter was always full of surprise at prolonged spells of good behavior.
He did not go up direct as he had come down in the King of Okky's sixty man-power war canoe. He prospected the labyrinth of waterways for other channels, and charted them out with infinite care. He intended to take every possible precaution for preserving the secrecy of his mine. Even if he was followed, and he took it for granted that on some future voyage he presently would be followed, he wanted to be able to puzzle pursuit.
At a point agreed upon he put into a village which sprawled along the bank, and presented the King's mandate, and demanded canoes. The villagers gave them without enthusiasm and without demur. He took these in tow, great cotton-wood dugouts that would hold a hundred men apiece, and hauled them after him, winding through great tree-hedged waterways where twilight reigned half the day, and then coming out between vast park-like savannas where the sun scorched them unchecked and grazing deer tempted the rifle.