The Essential Edgar Wallace Collection. Edgar Wallace
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The very evasiveness of the replies put Bones into a fret. He scouted the paths and found indications of people having passed over all three.
He sent his gun back to the _Zaire_, divided his party into three, and accompanied by half a dozen men, he himself took the middle path.
For an hour he trudged, losing his way, and finding it again. He came upon a further division of paths and split up his little force again.
In the end he found himself alone, struggling over the rough ground in a darkness illuminated only by the electric lamp he carried, and making for a faint gleam of red light which showed through the trees ahead.
M'bisibi held the child on his outstretched hands, a fat little child, with large, wondering eyes that stared solemnly at the dancing flames, and sucked a small brown thumb contentedly.
"Behold this child, oh chiefs and people," said M'bisibi, "who was born as I predicted, and is filled with devils!"
The baby turned his head so that his fat little neck was all rolled and creased, and said "Ah!" to the pretty fire, and chuckled.
"Even now the devils speak," said M'bisibi, "but presently you shall hear them screaming through the world because I have scattered them," and he made his way to the bowed saplings.
Bones, his face scratched and bleeding, his uniform torn in a dozen places, came swiftly after him.
"My bird, I think," said Bones, and caught the child unscientifically.
Picture Bones with a baby under his arm--a baby indignant, outraged, infernally uncomfortable, and grimacing a yell into being.
"Lord," said M'bisibi, breathing quickly, "what do you seek?"
"That which I have," said Bones, waving him off with the black muzzle of his automatic Colt. "Tomorrow you shall answer for many crimes."
He backed quickly to the cover of the woods, scenting the trouble that was coming.
He heard the old man's roar.
"O people ... this white man will loose devils upon the land!"
Then a throwing spear snicked the trunk of a tree, and another, for there were no soldiers, and this congregation of exorcisers were mad with wrath at the thought of the evil which Tibbetti was preparing for them.
"Snick!"
A spear struck Bones' boot.
"Shut your eyes, baby," said Bones, and fired into the brown. Then he ran for his life. Over roots and fallen trees he fell and stumbled, his tiny passenger yelling desperately.
"Oh, shut up!" snarled Bones, "what the dickens are you shouting about--hey? Haven't I saved your young life, you ungrateful little devil?"
Now and again he would stop to consult his illuminated compass. That the pursuit continued he knew, but he had the dubious satisfaction of knowing, too, that he had left the path and was in the forest.
Then he heard a faint shot, and another, and another, and grinned.
His pursuers had stumbled upon a party of Houssas.
From sheer exhaustion the baby had fallen asleep. Babies were confoundedly heavy--Bones had never observed the fact before, but with the strap of his sword belt he fashioned a sling that relieved him of some of the weight.
He took it easier now, for he knew M'bisibi's men would be frightened off. He rested for half an hour on the ground, and then came a snuffling leopard walking silently through the forest, betraying his presence only by the two green danger-lamps of his eyes.
Bones sat up and flourished his lamp upon the startled beast, which growled in fright, and went scampering through the forest like the great cat that he was.
The growl woke Bones' charge, and he awoke hungry and disinclined to further sleep without that inducement and comfort which his nurse was in no position to offer, whereupon Bones snuggled the whimpering child.
"He's a wicked old leopard!" he said, "to come and wake a child at this time of the night."
The knuckle of Bones' little finger soothed the baby, though it was a poor substitute for the nutriment it had every right to expect, and it whimpered itself to sleep.
Lieutenant Tibbetts looked at his compass again. He had located the shots to eastward, but he did not care to make a bee-line in that direction for fear of falling upon some of the enemy, whom he knew would be, at this time, making their way to the river.
For two hours before dawn he snatched a little sleep, and was awakened by a fierce tugging at his nose. He got up, laid the baby on the soft ground, and stood with arms akimbo, and his monocle firmly fixed, surveying his noisy companion.
"What the dooce are you making all this row about?" he asked indignantly. "Have a little patience, young feller, exercise a little _suaviter in modo_, dear old baby!"
But still the fat little morsel on the ground continued his noisy monologue, protesting in a language which is of an age rather than of a race, against the cruelty and the thoughtlessness and the distressing lack of consideration which his elder and better was showing him.
"I suppose you want some grub," said Bones, in dismay; and looked round helplessly.
He searched the pocket of his haversack, and had the good fortune to find a biscuit; his vacuum flask had just half a cup of warm tea. He fed the baby with soaked biscuit and drank the tea himself.
"You ought to have a bath or something," said Bones, severely; but it was not until an hour later that he found a forest pool in which to perform the ablution.
At three o'clock in the afternoon, as near as he could judge, for his watch had stopped, he struck a path, and would have reached the village before sundown, but for the fact that he again missed the path, and learnt of this fact about the same time he discovered he had lost his compass.
Bones looked dismally at the wide-awake child.
"Dear old companion in arms," he said, gloomily, "we are lost."
The baby's face creased in a smile.
"It's nothing to laugh about, you silly ass," said Bones.
IV
"Master, of our Lord Tibbetti I do not know," said M'bisibi sullenly.
"Yet you shall know before the sun is black," said Hamilton, "and your young men shall find him, or there is a tree for you, old man, a quick death by _Ewa_!"
"I have sought, my lord," said M'bisibi, "all my hunters have searched the forest, yet we have not found him. A certain devil-pot is here."
He fumbled under a native cloth and drew forth Bones' compass.
"This only could we find on the forest path that leads to Inilaki."
"And the child is with him?"
"So men say," said M'bisibi, "though by my magic I know that the child will die, for how can a white man who knows nothing of little children give him life and comfort? Yet," he amended carefully, since it was necessary to preserve the character of the intended victim, "if this child is indeed a devil child, as I believe, he will lead my lord Tibbetti to terrible places and return himself unharmed."
"He will lead you to a place more terrible," said M'ilitani, significantly, and sent a nimble climber into the trees to fasten a block and tackle to a stout branch, and thread a rope through.
It was so effective that M'bisibi, an old man, became most energetically active. _Lokali_ and swift messengers sent his villages to the search. Every half-hour the Hotchkiss gun of the