Near sunset Elebi halted suddenly and pondered. Before him ran his long shadow; the sun was behind him when it ought to have been in front. "We are going in the wrong direction," he said, and the men dropped their loads and stared at him. "Beyond any doubt," said Elebi after a pause, "this is the work of devils--let us pray." He prayed aloud earnestly for twenty minutes, and darkness had fallen before he had finished. They camped that night on the spot where the last red guide was, and in the morning they returned the way they had come. There was plenty of provision, but water was hard to come by, and therein lay the danger. Less than a mile they had gone before the red rags had vanished completely, and they wandered helplessly in a circle. "This is evidently a matter not for prayer, but for sacrifice," concluded Elebi, so they slew one of the guides. Three nights later, O'Sako, the friend of Elebi, crawled stealthily to the place where Elebi was sleeping, and settled the dispute which had arisen during the day as to who was in command of the expedition. * * * * * "Master," said Bosambo of Monrovia, "all that you ordered me to do, that I did." Sanders sat before the chief's hut in his camp chair and nodded. "When your word came that I should find Elebi--he being an enemy of the Government and disobeying your word--I took fifty of my young men and followed on his tracks. At first the way was easy, because he had tied strips of cloth to the trees to guide him on the backward journey, but afterwards it was hard, for the _N'Kema_ that live in the wood----" "Monkeys?" Sanders raised his eyebrows. "Monkeys, master," Bosambo nodded his head, "the little black monkeys of the forest who love bright colours--they had come down from their trees and torn away the cloths and taken them to their houses after the fashion of the monkey people. Thus Elebi lost himself and with him his men, for I found their bones, knowing the way of the forest." "What else did you find?" asked Sanders. "Nothing, master," said Bosambo, looking him straight in the eye. "That is probably a lie!" said Sanders. Bosambo thought of the ivory buried beneath the floor of his hut and did not contradict him. [Footnote 4: Bula Matidi, _i.e._, "Stone Breaker," is the native name for the Congo Government.] CHAPTER X. THE LOVES OF M'LINO. When a man loves one woman, whether she be alive or dead, a deep and fragrant memory or a very pleasant reality, he is apt to earn the appellation of "woman-hater," a hasty judgment which the loose-minded pass upon any man whose loves lack promiscuosity, and who does not diffuse his passions. Sanders was described as a woman-hater by such men who knew him sufficiently little to analyse his character, but Sanders was not a woman-hater in any sense of the word, for he bore no illwill toward woman kind, and certainly was innocent of any secret love.