The Keepers of the King's Peace. Wallace Edgar
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looked down at the unconscious Bones for a long time in silence.
"What will he say when I kick him?" asked Hamilton. "You can have the first guess."
Sanders frowned thoughtfully.
"He'll say that he was thinking out a new system of communicating trenches," he said. "He's been boring me to tears over saps and things."
Hamilton shook his head.
"Wrong, sir," he said; "that isn't the lie he'll tell. He will say that I kept him up so late last night working at the men's pay-sheets that he couldn't keep awake."
Bones slept on.
"He may say that it was coffee after tiffin," suggested Sanders after a while; "he said the other day that coffee always made him sleep."
"'Swoon' was the word he used, sir," corrected Hamilton. "I don't think he'll offer that suggestion now—the only other excuse I can think of is that he was repeating the Bomongo irregular verbs. Bones!"
He stooped and broke off a long grass and inserted it in the right ear of Lieutenant Tibbetts, twiddling the end delicately. Bones made a feeble clutch at his ear, but did not open his eyes.
"Bones!" said Hamilton, and kicked him less gently. "Get up, you lazy devil—there's an invasion."
Bones leapt to his feet and staggered a little; blinked fiercely at his superior and saluted.
"Enemy on the left flank, sir," he reported stiffly. "Shall we have dinner or take a taxi?"
"Wake up, Napoleon," begged Hamilton, "you're at Waterloo."
Bones blinked more slowly.
"I'm afraid I've been unconscious, dear old officer," he confessed. "The fact is–"
"Listen to this, everybody," said Hamilton admiringly.
"The fact is, sir," said Bones, with dignity, "I fell asleep—that beastly coffee I had after lunch, added to the fatigue of sittin' up half the night with those jolly old accounts of yours, got the better of me. I was sittin' down workin' out one of the dinkiest little ideas in trenches—a sort of communicatin' trench where you needn't get wet in the rainiest weather—when I—well, I just swooned off."
Hamilton looked disappointed.
"Weren't you doing anything with the Bomongo verbs?" he demanded.
A light came to Bones's eyes.
"By Jove, sir!" he said heartily, "that was it, of course.... The last thing I remember was...."
"Kick that man of yours and come back to the bungalow," Hamilton interrupted, "there's a job for you, my boy."
He walked across and stirred the second sleeper with the toe of his boot.
Ali Abid wriggled round and sat up.
He was square of face, with a large mouth and two very big brown eyes. He was enormously fat, but it was not fat of the flabby type. Though he called himself Ali, it was, as Bones admitted, "sheer swank" to do so, for this man had "coast" written all over him.
He got up slowly and saluted first his master, then Sanders, and lastly Hamilton.
Bones had found him at Cape Coast Castle on the occasion of a joy-ride which the young officer had taken on a British man-of-war. Ali Abid had been the heaven-sent servant, and though Sanders had a horror of natives who spoke English, the English of Ali Abid was his very own.
He had been for five years the servant of Professor Garrileigh, the eminent bacteriologist, the account of whose researches in the field of tropical medicines fill eight volumes of closely-printed matter, every page of which contains words which are not to be found in most lexicons.
They walked back to the Residency, Ali Abid in the rear.
"I want you to go up to the Isongo, Bones," said Sanders; "there may be some trouble there—a woman is working miracles."
"He might get a new head," murmured Hamilton, but Bones pretended not to hear.
"Use your tact and get back before the 17th for the party."
"The–?" asked Bones.
He had an irritating trick of employing extravagant gestures of a fairly commonplace kind. Thus, if he desired to hear a statement repeated—though he had heard it well enough the first time—he would bend his head with a puzzled wrinkle of forehead, put his hand to his ear and wait anxiously, even painfully, for the repetition.
"You heard what the Commissioner said," growled Hamilton. "Party—P-A-R-T-Y."
"My birthday is not until April, your Excellency," said Bones.
"I'd guess the date—but what's the use?" interposed Hamilton.
"It isn't a birthday party, Bones," said Sanders. "We are giving a house-warming for Miss Hamilton."
Bones gasped, and turned an incredulous eye upon his chief.
"You haven't a sister, surely, dear old officer?" he asked.
"Why the dickens shouldn't I have a sister?" demanded his chief.
Bones shrugged his shoulders.
"A matter of deduction, sir," he said quietly. "Absence of all evidence of a soothin' and lovin' influence in your lonely an' unsympathetic upbringin'; hardness of heart an' a disposition to nag, combined with a rough and unpromisin' exterior—a sister, good Lord!"
"Anyway, she's coming, Bones," said Hamilton; "and she's looking forward to seeing you—I've written an awful lot about you."
Bones smirked.
"Of course," he said, "you've overdone it a bit—women hate to be disillusioned. What you ought to have done, sir, is to describe me as a sort of ass—genial and all that sort of thing, but a commonplace sort of ass."
Hamilton nodded.
"That's exactly what I've done, Bones," he said. "I told her how Bosambo did you in the eye for twenty pounds, and how you fell into the water looking for buried treasure, and how the Isisi tried to sell you a flying crocodile and would have sold it too, if it hadn't been for my timely arrival. I told her–"
"I think you've said enough, sir."
Bones was very red and very haughty.
"Far be it from me to resent your attitude or contradict your calumnies. Miss Hamilton will see very little of me. An inflexible sense of duty will keep me away from the frivolous circle of society, sir. Alert an' sleepless–"
"Trenches," said Hamilton brutally.
Bones winced, regarded his superior for a moment with pain, saluted, and turning on his heel, stalked away, followed by Ali Abid no less pained.
He left at dawn the next morning, and both Sanders and Hamilton came down to the concrete quay to see the Zaire start on her journey. Sanders gave his final instructions—
"If the woman is upsetting the people, arrest her; if she has too big a hold on them, arrest her; but if she is just amusing them, come back."
"And don't forget the 17th," said Hamilton.
"I may arrive a little late for that," said Bones gravely. "I don't wish to be a skeleton at your jolly old festive board, dear old sportsman—you will excuse my absence to Miss Hamilton. I shall probably have a headache and all that sort of thing."
He waved a sad farewell as the Zaire passed round the bend of the river, and looked, as he desired to look, a melancholy figure with his huge pipe in his mouth and his hands thrust dejectedly into his trousers pockets.
Once out of sight he became his own jovial self.
"Lieutenant Ali," he said, "get out my log and put it in old Sanders' cabin, make me a cup of tea and keep her jolly old head east, east by north."
"Ay, ay, sir," said Ali in excellent English.
The "log" which Bones kept was one of the secret documents which never come under the eye of the superior authorities. There were such entries as—
"Wind N.N.W.