see the hill you've made from five miles off! A hundred thousand tusks
would make a mountain! If any one buried a million tusks in one spot
they'd mark the place on maps as a watershed! They must be buried
here, there, everywhere along the trail of Tippoo Tib--perhaps a
thousand in one place at the most. Which of you two gentlemen is the
lord?"

"Did Hassan lead you to any of it?" Fred inquired.

"Not he! The jelly-belly! The Arab pig! He led me to Ujiji--that's
on Lake Tanganika--the old slave market where he himself was once sold
for ten cents. I don't doubt a piece of betel nut and a pair of
worn-out shoes had to be thrown in with him at the price! There he
tried to make me pay the expenses in advance of a trip to Usumbora at
the head of the lake. God knows what it would have cost, the way he
wanted me to do it! Are you the lord, sir?"

"What did you do?" asked Fred.

"Do? I parted company! I had made him drunk once. (The Arabs aren't
supposed to drink, so when they do they get talkative and lively!) And
I knew Arabic before ever I crossed the Atlantic--learned it in
Egypt--ran away from a sponge-fishing boat when I was a boy. No, they
don't fish sponges off the Nile Delta, but you can smuggle in a sponge
boat better than in most ships. Anyhow, I learned Arabic. So I
understood what that pig Hassan said when he talked in the dark with
his brother swine. He knew no more than I where the ivory was! He
suspected most of it was in a country called Ruanda that runs pretty
much parallel with the Congo border to the west of Victoria Nyanza in
German East Africa, and he was counting on finding natives who could