The Essential Edgar Wallace Collection. Edgar Wallace
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or mine or your own, Bones--but for--well, for the whole crowd of us--white folk. You'll have to do your best, old man."
Bones took the other's hand, snivelled a bit despite his fierce effort of restraint, and went aboard the _Zaire_.
* * * * *
"Tell all men," said B'chumbiri, addressing his impassive relatives, "that I go to a great day and to many strange lands."
He was tall and knobby-kneed, spoke with a squeak at the end of his deeper sentences, and about his tired eyes he had made a red circle with camwood. Round his head he had twisted a wire so tightly that it all but cut the flesh: this was necessary, for B'chumbiri had a headache which never left him day or night.
Now he stood, his lank body wrapped in a blanket, and he looked with dull eyes from face to face.
"I see you," he said at last, and repeated his motto which had something to do with monkeys.
They watched him go down the street towards the beech where the easiest canoe in the village was moored.
"It is better if we go after him and put out his eyes," said his elder brother; "else who knows what damage he will do for which we must pay?"
Only B'chumbiri's mother looked after him with a mouth that drooped at the side, for he was her only son, all the others being by other wives of Mochimo.
His father and his uncle stood apart and whispered, and presently when, with a great waving of arms, B'chumbiri had embarked, they went out of the village by the forest path and ran tirelessly till they struck the river at its bend.
"Here we will wait," panted the uncle, "and when B'chumbiri comes we will call him to land, for he has the sickness _mongo_."
"What of Sandi?" asked the father, who was no gossip.
"Sandi is gone," replied the other, "and there is no law."
Presently B'chumbiri came sweeping round the bend, singing in his poor, cracked voice about a land and a people and treasures ... he turned his canoe at his father's bidding, and came obediently to land....
Overhead the sky was a vivid blue, and the water which moved quickly between the rocky channel of the Lower Isisi caught something of the blue, though the thick green of elephant grass by the water's edge and the overhanging spread of gum trees took away from the clarity of reflection.
There was, too, a gentle breeze and a pleasing absence of flies, so that a man might get under the red and white striped awning of the _Zaire_ and think or read or dream dreams, and find life a pleasant experience, and something to be thankful for.
Such a day does not often come upon the river, but if it does, the deep channel of the Isisi focuses all the joy of it. Here the river runs as straight as a canal for six miles, the current swifter and stronger between the guiding banks than elsewhere. There are rocks, charted and known, for the bed of the river undergoes no change, the swift waters carry no sands to choke the fairway, navigation is largely a matter of engine power and rule of thumb. Going slowly up stream a little more than two knots an hour, the _Zaire_ was for once a pleasure steamer. Her long-barrelled Hotchkiss guns were hidden in their canvas jackets, the Maxims were lashed to the side of the bridge out of sight, and Lieutenant Augustus Tibbetts, who sprawled in a big wicker-work chair with an illustrated paper on his knees, a nasal-toned phonograph at his feet, and a long glass of lemon squash at his elbow, had little to do but pass the pleasant hours in the most pleasant occupation he could conceive, which was the posting of a diary, which he hoped on some future occasion to publish.
A shout, quick and sharp, brought him to his feet, a stiffly outstretched hand pointed to the waters.
"What the dooce----" demanded Bones indignantly, and looked over the side.... He saw the pitiful thing that rolled slowly in the swift current, and the homely face of Bones hardened.
"Damn," he said, and the wheel of the _Zaire_ spun, and the little boat came broadside to the stream before the threshing wheel got purchase on the water.
It was Bones' sinewy hand that gripped the poor arm and brought the body to the side of the canoe into which he had jumped as the boat came round.
"Um," said Bones, seeing what he saw; "who knows this man?"
"Lord," said a wooding man, "this is B'chumbiri who was mad, and he lived in the village near by."
"There will we go," said Bones, very gravely.
Now all the people of M'fa knew that the father of B'chumbiri and his uncle had put away the tiresome youth with his headache and his silly talk, and when there came news that the _Zaire_ was beating her way to the village there was a hasty _likambo_ of the eldermen.
"Since this is neither Sandi nor M'ilitani who comes," said the chief, an old man, N'jela ("the Bringer"), "but Moon-in-the-Eye, who is a child, let us say that B'chumbiri fell into the water so that the crocodiles had him, and if he asks us who slew B'chumbiri--for it may be that he knows--let none speak, and afterwards we will tell M'ilitani that we did not understand him."
With this arrangement all agreed; for surely here was a palaver not to be feared.
Bones came with his escort of Houssas.
From the dark interiors of thatched huts men and women watched his thin figure going up the street, and laughed.
Nor did they laugh softly. Bones heard the chuckles of unseen people, divined that contempt, and his lips trembled. He felt an immense loneliness--all the weight of government was pressed down upon his head, it overwhelmed, it smothered him.
Yet he kept a tight hold upon himself, and by a supreme effort of will showed no sign of his perturbation.
The palaver was of little value to Bones; the village was blandly innocent of murder or knowledge of murder. More than this, all men stoutly swore that the thing that lay upon the foreshore for identification, surrounded by a crowd of frowning and frightened little boys lured by the very gruesomeness of the spectacle, was unknown, and laughed openly at the suggestion that it was B'chumbiri, who (said they) had gone a Journey into the forest.
There was little short of open mockery and defiance when they pointed out certain indications that went to prove that this man was not of the Akasava, but of the higher Isisi.
So Bones' visit was fruitless.
He dismissed the palaver and walked back to his ship, and worked the river, village by village, with no more satisfactory result. That night in the little town of M'fa there was a dance and a jubilation to celebrate the cunning of a people who had outwitted and overawed the lords of the land, but the next day came Bosambo, who had established a system of espionage more far-reaching, and possibly more effective, than the service which the Government had instituted.
Liberties they might take with Bones; but they sat discomforted in palaver before this alien chief, swathed in monkey tails, his shield in one hand, and his bunch of spears in the other.
"All things I know," said Bosambo, when they told him what they had to tell, "and it has come to me that you have spoken lightly of Tibbetti, who is my friend and my master, and is well beloved of Sandi. Also they tell me that you smiled at him. Now I tell you there will come a day when you will not smile, and that day is near at hand."
"Lord," said the chief, "he made with us a foolish palaver, believing that we had put away B'chumbiri."
"And he shall return to that foolish palaver," said Bosambo grimly, "and if he goes away unsatisfied, behold I will come, and I will take your old men, and I will hang them by hooks into a tree and roast their feet. For if there is no Sandi and no law, behold I am Sandi and I law, doing the will of a certain bearded king, Togi-tani."
He left the village of M'fa a little unhappy for the space of a day, when, native-like,