I will just take a quick canoe, and run down to Loango to fetch some." He turned quite away from them, and stooped to attach the lace of his boot.
"I can travel night and day, and be back here in three days," he added.
"In the meantime you can be getting on with the loading of the canoes, and we will start as soon as I get back." He stood upright and looked around with weatherwise, furtive eyes.
"Seems to me," he said, "there's thunder coming.

I think I had better be off at once." In the course of his inspection of the lowering clouds which hung, black as ink, just above the trees, his eyes lighted on Joseph, standing within the door of the cottage, watching him with a singular half-suppressed smile.
"Yes," he said hurriedly, "I will start at once.

I can eat some sort of a breakfast when we are under way." He looked beneath his lashes quickly from Jack to Guy and back again.
Their silent acquiescence was not quite satisfactory.

Then he called his own men, and spoke to them in a tongue unknown to the Englishmen.
He hurried forward their preparations with a feverish irritability which made Jack Meredith think of the first time he had ever seen Durnovo--a few miles farther down the river--all palpitating and trembling with climatic nervousness.

His face was quite yellow, and there was a line drawn diagonally from the nostrils down each cheek, to lose itself ultimately in the heavy black moustache.
Before he stepped into his canoe the thunder was rumbling in the distance, and the air was still as death.