Then the doctor took a wicker basket, covered with a rough wooden lid.  The Fans gathered in front of him; he repeated their names one after the other and at each name he lifted the lid.  But that plan appeared to be no improvement, for the lid never stuck.  It came off readily at each name.  Walker, meanwhile, calculated the distance a man would have to cover who walked across country from Bonny river to the Ogowe, and he reflected with some relief that the chances were several thousand to one that any man who made the attempt, be he black or white, would be eaten on the way.

The witch doctor turned up the big square cuffs of his sleeves, as a conjurer will do, and again repeated the names.  This time, however, at each name, he rubbed the palms of his hands together.  Walker was seized with a sudden longing to rush down into the village and examine the man’s right forearm for a bullet mark.  The longing grew on him.  The witch doctor went steadily through the list.  Walker rose to his feet and took a step or two down the hillock, when, of a sudden, at one particular name, the doctor’s hands flew apart and waved wildly about him.  A single cry from a single voice went up out of the group of Fans.  The group fell back and left one man standing alone.  He made no defence, no resistance.  Two men came forward and bound his hands and his feet and his body with tie-tie.  Then they carried him within a hut.

“That’s sheer murder,” thought Walker.  He could not rescue the victim, he knew.  But—­he could get a nearer view of that witch doctor.  Already the man was packing up his paraphernalia.  Walker stepped back among the trees and, running with all his speed, made the circuit of the village.  He reached the further end of the street just as the witch doctor walked out into the open.

Walker ran forward a yard or so until he too stood plain to see on the level ground.  The witch doctor did see him and stopped.  He stopped only for a moment and gazed earnestly in Walker’s direction.  Then he went on again towards his own hut in the forest.

Walker made no attempt to follow him.  “He has seen me,” he thought.  “If he knows me he will come down to the river bank to-night.”  Consequently, he made the black rowers camp a couple of hundred yards down stream.  He himself remained alone in his canoe.

The night fell moonless and black, and the enclosing forest made it yet blacker.  A few stars burned in the strip of sky above his head like gold spangles on a strip of black velvet.  Those stars and the glimmering of the clay bank to which the boat was moored were the only lights which Walker had.  It was as dark as the night when Walker waited for Hatteras at the wicket-gate.