When he left the hut later, after eating a bowl of manioc, he carried a long sharp knife. Stealing along behind the huts, he made his way in the darkness to a remote spot, climbed up into a tree, and disappeared. Half an hour later he crept back to Mirambo’s hut, restored the knife, which the man would have to account for next day, and then returned to his own lodging, and slipped in unperceived by his fellow inmates. His exit was prepared, but no negro travels willingly by night. Next day, at the time when the negroes had their midday meal, he was about to make his escape from a place no longer endurable to him, when he caught sight of Reinecke leaving by the gate, again unattended. Mwesa looked around; no one else was in sight. He shinned up the tree he had climbed the night before. A few minutes later he was running like a wild animal through the scrub outside the fence. He posted himself among the trees at a spot where he could not fail to see Reinecke as he left the gate. When the German had passed, the negro followed him with the stealth of one come of a long line of hunters, tracking him over the course he had pursued on the previous day, without revealing himself by so much as a rustle among the leaves or the crack of a fallen twig. As Reinecke approached the pit, no guardian spirit told him of the watcher whose eager face was looking at him out of a frame of green foliage, whose keen ears pricked up as he heard his master speaking to some one below him. When the German, his eyes alight with malign triumph, turned to retrace his steps there was nothing to show that he had been found out; the face had disappeared. Nor could Reinecke suspect that he was dogged back to the plantation, and that when the gate had closed upon him, a negro lad, lithe as a young antelope, bounded back to the pit, and peered anxiously into the depths. Tom had relapsed into a state of half-consciousness. He was roused by a voice, and looking up, saw a black shiny face gazing down upon him. Two rows of white teeth parted, two big eyes danced with delight when they saw the white man glance upward. "Sah, sah!" called the voice. "Who are you?" Tom murmured faintly. "Me Mwesa, sah; me come back bimeby, you see." The lad ran back into the forest. Tom lay as in a dream. Who was this negro that spoke negro’s English, and had called him "sah"? He had never heard any of Reinecke’s slaves use English, yet what negro in these parts could be other than one of Reinecke’s slaves? Where had the boy gone? What was he going to do? Tom felt almost too weak and listless even to hope.