A tremendous howl was heard from the Arabs, but, completely engrossed by the pursuit, they had not taken notice of the balloon, which was now but five hundred paces behind them, and only about thirty feet from the ground. On their part, they were not twenty lengths of their horses from the fugitive.
One of them was very perceptibly gaining on Joe, and was about to pierce him with his lance, when Kennedy, with fixed eye and steady hand, stopped him short with a ball, that hurled him to the earth.
Joe did not even turn his head at the report. Some of the horsemen reined in their barbs, and fell on their faces in the dust as they caught sight of the _Victoria;_ the rest continued their pursuit.
“But what is Joe about?” said Kennedy; “he don’t stop!”
“He’s doing better than that, Dick! I understand him! He’s keeping on in the same direction as the balloon. He relies upon our intelligence. Ah! the noble fellow! We’ll carry him off in the very teeth of those Arab rascals! We are not more than two hundred paces from him!”
“What are we to do?” asked Kennedy.
“Lay aside your rifle, Dick.”
And the Scot obeyed the request at once.
“Do you think that you can hold one hundred and fifty pounds of ballast in your arms?”
“Ay, more than that!”
“No! That will be enough!”
And the doctor proceeded to pile up bags of sand in Kennedy’s arms.
“Hold yourself in readiness in the back part of the car, and be prepared to throw out that ballast at a single effort. But, for your life, don’t do so until I give the word!”
“Be easy on that point.”
“Otherwise, we should miss Joe, and he would be lost.”
“Count upon me!”
The _Victoria_ at that moment almost commanded the troop of horsemen who were still desperately urging their steeds at Joe’s heels. The doctor, standing in the front of the car, held the ladder clear, ready to throw it at any moment. Meanwhile, Joe had still maintained the distance between himself and his pursuers—say about fifty feet. The _Victoria_ was now ahead of the party.
“Attention!” exclaimed the doctor to Kennedy.
“I’m ready!”
“Joe, look out for yourself!” shouted the doctor in his sonorous, ringing voice, as he flung out the ladder, the lowest ratlines of which tossed up the dust of the road.
As the doctor shouted, Joe had turned his head, but without checking his horse. The ladder dropped close to him, and at the instant he grasped it the doctor again shouted to Kennedy:
“Throw ballast!”
“It’s done!”
And the _Victoria_, lightened by a weight greater than Joe’s, shot up one hundred and fifty feet into the air.
Joe clung with all his strength to the ladder during the wide oscillations that it had to describe, and then making an indescribable gesture to the Arabs, and climbing with the agility of a monkey, he sprang up to his companions, who received him with open arms.
The Arabs uttered a scream of astonishment and rage. The fugitive had been snatched from them on the wing, and the _Victoria_ was rapidly speeding far beyond their reach.
“Master! Kennedy!” ejaculated Joe, and overwhelmed, at last, with fatigue and emotion, the poor fellow fainted away, while Kennedy, almost beside himself, kept exclaiming:
“Saved—saved!”
“Saved indeed!” murmured the doctor, who had recovered all his phlegmatic coolness.
Joe was almost naked. His bleeding arms, his body covered with cuts and bruises, told what his sufferings had been. The doctor quietly dressed his wounds, and laid him comfortably under the awning.
Joe soon returned to consciousness, and asked for a glass of brandy, which the doctor did not see fit to refuse, as the faithful fellow had to be indulged.
After he had swallowed the stimulant, Joe grasped the hands of his two friends and announced that he was ready to relate what had happened to him.
But they would not allow him to talk at that time, and he sank back into a profound sleep, of which he seemed to have the greatest possible need.
The _Victoria_ was then taking an oblique line to the westward. Driven by a tempestuous wind, it again approached the borders of the thorny desert, which the travellers descried over the tops of palm-trees, bent and broken by the storm; and, after having made a run of two hundred miles since rescuing Joe, it passed the tenth degree of east longitude about nightfall.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVENTH.
The Western Route.—Joe wakes up.—His Obstinacy.—End of Joe’s Narrative.—Tagelei.—Kennedy’s Anxieties.—The Route to the North.—A Night near Aghades.
During the night the wind lulled as though reposing after the boisterousness of the day, and the _Victoria_ remained quietly at the top of the tall sycamore. The doctor and Kennedy kept watch by turns, and Joe availed himself of the chance to sleep most sturdily for twenty-four hours at a stretch.
“That’s the remedy he needs,” said Dr. Ferguson. “Nature will take charge of his care.”
With the dawn the wind sprang up again in quite strong, and moreover capricious gusts. It shifted abruptly from south to north, but finally the _Victoria_ was carried away by it toward the west.
The doctor, map in hand, recognized the kingdom of Damerghou, an undulating region of great fertility, in which the huts that compose the villages are constructed of long reeds interwoven with branches of the _asclepia_. The grain-mills were seen raised in the cultivated fields, upon small scaffoldings or platforms, to keep them out of the reach of the mice and the huge ants of that country.
They soon passed the town of Zinder, recognized by its spacious place of execution, in the centre of which stands the “tree of death.” At its foot the executioner stands waiting, and whoever passes beneath its shadow is immediately hung!
Upon consulting his compass, Kennedy could not refrain from saying:
“Look! we are again moving northward.”
“No matter; if it only takes us to Timbuctoo, we shall not complain. Never was a finer voyage accomplished under better circumstances!”
“Nor in better health,” said Joe, at that instant thrusting his jolly countenance from between the curtains of the awning.
“There he is! there’s our gallant friend—our preserver!” exclaimed Kennedy, cordially.—“How goes it, Joe?”
“Oh! why, naturally enough, Mr. Kennedy, very naturally! I never felt better in my life! Nothing sets a man up like a little pleasure-trip with a bath in Lake Tchad to start on—eh, doctor?”
“Brave fellow!” said Ferguson, pressing Joe’s hand, “what terrible anxiety you caused us!”
“Humph! and you, sir? Do you think that I felt easy in my mind about you, gentlemen? You gave me a fine fright, let me tell you!”
“We shall never agree in the world, Joe, if you take things in that style.”
“I see that his tumble hasn’t changed him a bit,” added Kennedy.
“Your devotion and self-forgetfulness were sublime, my brave lad, and they saved us, for the _Victoria_ was falling into the lake, and, once there, nobody could have extricated her.”
“But, if my devotion, as you are pleased to call my summerset, saved you, did it not save me too, for here we are, all three of us, in first-rate health? Consequently we have nothing to squabble about in the whole affair.”
“Oh! we can never come to a settlement with that youth,” said the sportsman.
“The best way to settle it,” replied Joe, “is to say nothing more about the matter. What’s done is done. Good or bad, we can’t take it back.”
“You obstinate fellow!” said the doctor, laughing; “you can’t refuse, though, to tell us your adventures, at all events.”
“Not if you think it worth while. But, in the first place, I’m going to cook this fat goose to a turn, for I see that Mr. Kennedy has not wasted his time.”
“All right, Joe!”
“Well, let us see then how this African game will sit on a European stomach!”
The goose was soon roasted by the flame of the blow-pipe, and not long afterward was comfortably stowed away. Joe took his own good share, like a man who had eaten nothing for several days. After the tea and the punch, he acquainted his friends with his recent adventures. He spoke with some emotion, even while looking at things with his usual philosophy. The doctor could not refrain from frequently pressing his hand when he saw his worthy servant more considerate of his master’s safety than of his own, and, in relation to the sinking of the island of the Biddiomahs, he explained to him the frequency of this phenomenon upon Lake Tchad.
At length Joe, continuing his recital, arrived at the point where, sinking in the swamp, he had uttered a last cry of despair.
“I thought I was gone,” said he, “and as you came right into my mind, I made a hard fight for it. How, I couldn’t tell you—but I’d made up my mind that I wouldn’t go under without knowing why. Just then, I saw—two or three feet from me—what do you think? the end of a rope that had been fresh cut; so I took leave to make another jerk, and, by hook or by crook, I got to the rope. When I pulled, it didn’t give; so I pulled again and hauled away and there I was on dry ground! At the end of the rope, I found an anchor! Ah, master, I’ve a right to call that the anchor of safety, anyhow, if you have no objection. I knew it again! It was the anchor of the _Victoria!_ You had grounded there! So I followed the direction of the rope and that gave me your direction, and, after trying hard a few times more, I got out of the swamp. I had got my strength back with my spunk, and I walked on part of the night away from the lake, until I got to the edge of a very big wood. There I saw a fenced-in place, where some horses were grazing, without thinking of any harm. Now, there are times when everybody knows how to ride a horse, are there not, doctor? So I didn’t spend much time thinking about it, but jumped right on the back of one of those innocent animals and away we went galloping north as fast as our legs could carry us. I needn’t tell you about the towns that I didn’t see nor the villages that I took good care to go around. No! I crossed the ploughed fields; I leaped the hedges; I scrambled over the fences; I dug my heels into my nag; I thrashed him; I fairly lifted the poor fellow off his feet! At last I got to the end of the tilled land. Good! There was the desert. ‘That suits me!’ said I, ‘for I can see better ahead of me and farther too.’ I was hoping all the time to see the balloon tacking about and waiting for me. But not a bit of it; and so, in about three hours, I go plump, like a fool, into a camp of Arabs! Whew! what a hunt that was! You see, Mr. Kennedy, a hunter don’t know what a real hunt is until he’s been hunted himself! Still I advise him not to try it if he can keep out of it! My horse was so tired, he was ready to drop off his legs; they were close on me; I threw myself to the ground; then I jumped up again behind an Arab! I didn’t mean the fellow any harm, and I hope he has no grudge against me for choking him, but I saw you—and you know the rest. The _Victoria_ came on at my heels, and you caught me up flying, as a circus-rider does a ring. Wasn’t I right in counting on you? Now, doctor, you see how simple all that was! Nothing more natural in the world! I’m ready to begin over again, if it would be of any service to you. And besides, master, as I said a while ago, it’s not worth mentioning.”