Kwa and the Ape People by Perley Poore Sheehan

IT WAS strange how the memory of that spider he'd seen--or thought that he'd seen--came back to the prince the next morning the moment he left his tent and saw a strange black man seated near one of the cook- fires.

Or what had been a cook-fire. For the fire was now deserted by those who ordinarily would have been there. The cook-fire crowd were around another fire, evidently but recently started; and they were now making a pretense of getting on with their work. But it would have been manifest to anyone with half an eye that their attention was secretly--when not openly--fixed on that savage stranger near the fire they had left.