"I didn't kill him. It's just he's dead and now we get everything. We split three ways. I didn't like him anyway. Way he held his head and stuff, kind of gave me the creeps."

"I say we're splittin' nothing," Gromvitch said. "We haven't got anything to prove Blomberg wasn't nothin' more than wind. That talk sounded pretty good back at the Legion post, but now, with him dead and just having general directions, and us being in the actual jungle, I don't know."

"He got himself killed 'cause he was a fool," Cannon said.

"He got himself killed 'cause Talent killed him," Gromvitch said. "Carved him like a turkey."

"That was unfortunate," Wilson said. "But I still believe Blomberg's story."

And he did. Wilson had listened to Blomberg talk about the lost city at the Legion post. Blomberg claimed to have been there before becoming a Legionnaire. He wanted to desert and go back there, plunder the place, and become rich. He claimed there were people living there, mining gold, and had been for well over a couple hundred years.

Blomberg said he had been on an ivory-hunting safari, and had gotten lost and stumbled upon the city, had been taken captive by the natives who were mining it, but escaped. He had a handful of gold nuggets to prove it.

That's why Wilson had been eager to leave the Legion post. Blomberg was going to lead them there and they were all going to become rich together. But then Talent and Blomberg had gotten into it over a can of beans-a can of beans! And Talent, in a moment of mindless savagery, had cut Blomberg from gut to gill. Their living map had bled out his knowledge on the jungle floor.

"You got to think about it," Gromvitch said. "That story of his. A lost city of gold, mined by natives. How

many times you heard that one? How come we got to believe this story? Blomberg, he didn't strike me as a man that got his feelings hurt when he told a lie."

"What about them nuggets?" Cannon said.

"Man can come by gold lots of ways," Gromvitch said.

"I believe him," Wilson said again. "I got nothing outside, or inside Africa 'less I come out of here with some jack. I don't find any city, I can maybe hunt some ivory. Make enough to get to the States, maybe have a little in the kitty when I get there. I go out now, all I got is the rags on my back. I might as well go back to the Legion post."

"Since I figure they'll hang me if I do go back," Gromvitch said, "that's an option I'm rulin' out. But the way I see it, we got nothin'. Don't know there's nothin' out there, and nothin' split four ways or three or two, it's all the same. It comes up nothin'. Nothin' plus nothin' times three, that's nothin'. Right now, we got a little food, and guns to get some more, and I say we head for the coast."

"It's not just the gold," Wilson said.