le column operating in the
neighbourhood of the Rovuma had ceased to exist. There were other
roving forces still in the district, and against these the Haussas were
to operate in conjunction with other detachments.

"It's all right when we catch Fritz sitting," remarked Spofforth. "The
trouble is that he strongly objects to be caught. We'll have to chase
him from the Rovuma to Kilimanjaro and back before we square up this
business."

"And, even then, corner him in Cape Town," added Danvers facetiously.
"I can see myself spending my seventieth birthday on this job."

CHAPTER XIII

THE FUGITIVE

On the evening of the capture of M'ganga a white man, fatigued and
desperately hungry, stood irresolute upon the banks of the Kiwa River,
roughly forty miles from the scene of the Waffs' successful operations.

It would have been a difficult matter to recognise in the jaded man the
once well-set-up individual known in certain quarters as Robert
MacGregor; nor was there much resemblance between the fugitive and the
German secret service agent, Ulrich von Gobendorff--yet the man was
none other than he whom the officers of the Haussa regiment
particularly wished to lay by the heels.

By a series of hair-breadth escapes von Gobendorff had succeeded in
making his way past the Pathan infantry picquets. For twenty minutes
he had crouched up to his neck in the miasmatic waters of a forest
pool, with thousands of mosquitoes buzzing round his unprotected head,
while a patrol of the Rhodesian Light Horse halted within twenty yards
of his place of concealment.

And now, with a strip of linen tied round his head, a ragged cotton
shirt, a pair of "shorts" that were hardly any protection from the
thorny cacti, and a pair of badly-worn "veldt schoen" as the sum total
of his clothing and footgear von Gobendorff awaited the fall of night
in the depths of a tropical forest.

His limbs were covered with scratches that were causing him intense
pain and irritation; his face was swollen under the attacks of
mosquitoes, until his bloodshot eyes were hardly visible above his
puffed up cheeks. Unarmed with the exception of an automatic pistol,
he was about to brave the dangers of a night 'midst malarial mists and
wild beasts of an African forest.

As the sun sank von Gobendorff collected a heap of wood and leaves and
kindled a fire. For the present he judged that he was practically free
from pursuit. In any case he would take the