this filled Van Laer with an actual physical hunger. He
could have eaten that stuff that was wealth itself. He could have devoured
those tusks. He was Gargantua as far as his appetite was concerned, and
for the rest he was only Van Laer driving a quill in the office of De
Wiart.

He did not know that he was here on probation; that the good-natured and
seemingly lazy de Wiart was studying him and finding him satisfactory,
that very soon his desires would be fulfilled, and that he would be let
loose like a beast on the land of his longing, a living whip, an animated
thumb-screw, a knife with a brain in its haft.

When the soldiers had lost Berselius and Adams, they struck at once for
M'Bina, reaching it in a day's march.

Here they told their tale.

_Chef de Poste_ Meeus was dead. They had escorted a sick white man and a
big white man toward M'Bina. One night three leopards had prowled round
the camp and the soldiers had gone in pursuit of them.

The leopards escaped, but the soldiers could not find the white men
again.

De Wiart listened to this very fishy tale without believing a word of it,
except in so far as it related to Meeus.

"Where did you lose the white men?" asked de Wiart.

The soldiers did not know. One does not know where one loses a thing; if
one did, then the thing would not be lost.

"Just so," said De Wiart, agreeing to this very evident axiom, and more
than ever convinced that the story was a lie. Meeus was dead and the men
had come to report. They had delayed on the road to hold some jamboree of
their own, and this lie about the white men was to account for their
delay.

"Did anyone else come with you as well as the white men?" asked De Wiart.

"Yes, there was a porter, a Yandjali man. He had run away."

De Wiart pulled his blond beard meditatively, and looked at the river.

From the office where he was sitting the river, great with the rains and
lit by the sun which had broken through the clouds, looked like a moving
flood of gold. One might have fancied that all the wealth of the elephant
country, all the teeming riches of the forest, flowing by a thousand
streams and disdaining to wait for the alchemy of trade, had joined in one
Pactolian flood flowing toward Leopoldsville and the sea.

De Wiart was not thinking this. He dismissed the soldiers and told them to
hold themselves in readiness to return to M'Bassa on the morrow.

That evening he called Van Laer into the office.

"_Ch