before.

The extraordinary thing was that he had fed well, not being one of the
proscribed. He had stolen from pure greed.

He was an undersized man, a weakling, and likely to break down and give
trouble anyway. His crime was great.

Berselius sent Felix to his tent for a Mauser pistol. Then the body was
flung into the forest where the roaring, rasping cry of a leopard was
splitting the dark.

CHAPTER X

M'BASSA

Seven days' march took them one hundred and twenty miles east of Yandjali
and into the heart of the great rubber district of M'Bonga.

Twenty miles a day ought to have been covered on an average, but they had
delayed here and there to shoot, and the extra porters, whose duty it was
to carry the trophies, were already in requisition.

It had been forest most of the way, but forest broken by open spaces; they
had crossed two great swards of park-like country where the antelope herds
moved like clouds, marvellous natural preserves that might have been
English but for the tropic haze and heat and the great n'sambya trees with
their yellow bell-like blossoms, the m'binas with their bursts of scarlet
bloom, the tall feather-palms, and the wild papaws of the adjoining
woods.

But in the last two days of the march the forest had thickened and taken a
more sombre note; nothing they had come upon heretofore had been quite so
wild as this, so luxuriant and tropical. It was the haunt of the rubber
vine, that mysterious plant which requires a glass-house atmosphere and a
soil especially rich. The great rubber forest of M'Bonga, thousands of
square miles in extent, is really composed of two forests joined by an
isthmus of woods. Dimly, it is shaped like an hourglass; south of the
constriction where the two forests join lies the elephant country for
which Berselius was making, and Felix had led them so craftily and well,
that they struck into the rubber district only fifty miles from the
constriction.

In the forest, thirty miles from the elephant ground, lies the Belgian
fort M'Bassa. They were making for this place now, which was to be the
base from which they would start on the great hunt.

The fort of M'Bassa is not used to-day as a fort, only as a
collecting-place for rubber. In the early days it was a very necessary
entrenchment for the Belgians, as a tribe almost as warlike as the Zappo
Zaps terrorized the districts; but the people of this tribe have long been
brought under the blue flag with the