Chapter I: Bones, Sanders and Another

To Isongo, which stands upon the tributary of that name, came a woman of the Isisi who had lost her husband through a providential tree falling upon him. I say “providential,” for it was notorious that he was an evil man, a drinker of beer and a favourite of many bad persons. Also he made magic in the forest, and was reputedly the familiar of Bashunbi the devil brother of M’shimba-M’shamba. He beat his wives, and once had set fire to his house from sheer wickedness. So that when he was borne back to the village on a grass bier and the women of his house decked themselves with green leaves and arm in arm staggered and stamped through the village street in their death dance, there was a suspicion of hilarity in their song, and a more cheery step in their dance than the occasion called for.

An old man named D’wiri, who knew every step of every dance, saw this and said in his stern way that it was shameless. But he was old and was, moreover, in fear for the decorum of his own obsequies if these outrageous departures from custom were approved or allowed to pass without reprimand.

When M’lama, the wife of G’mami, had seen her lord depart in the canoe for burial in the middle island and had wailed her conventional grief, she washed the dust from her body at the river’s edge and went back to her hut. And all that was grief for the dead man was washed away with the dust of mourning.

Many moons came out of the sky, were wasted and died before the woman M’lama showed signs of her gifts. It is said that they appeared one night after a great storm wherein lightning played such strange tricks upon the river that even the old man D’wiri could not remember parallel instances.

In the night the wife of a hunter named E’sani-Osoni brought a dying child into the hut of the widow. He had been choked by a fish-bone and was in extremis when M’lama put her hand upon his head and straightway the bone flew from his mouth, “and there was a cry terrible to hear--such a cry as a leopard makes when he is pursued by ghosts.”

A week later a baby girl fell into a terrible fit and M’lama had laid her hand upon it and behold! it slept from that moment.

Ahmet, chief of the Government spies, heard of these happenings and came a three days’ journey by river to Isongo.

“What are these stories of miracles?” he asked.

“Capita,” said the chief, using the term of regard which is employed in the Belgian Congo, “this woman M’lama is a true witch and has great gifts, for she raises the dead by the touch of her hand. This I have seen. Also it is said that when U’gomi, the woodcutter, made a fault, cutting his foot in two, this woman healed him marvellously.”

“I will see this M’lama,” said Ahmet importantly.

He found her in her hut tossing four bones idly. These were the shanks of goats, and each time they fell differently.

“O Ahmet,” she said, when he entered, “you have a wife who is sick, also a first-born boy who does not speak though he is more than six seasons old.”

Ahmet squatted down by her side.

“Woman,” said he, “tell me something that is not the talk of river and I will believe your magic.”

“To-morrow your master, the lord Sandi, will send you a book which will give you happiness,” she said.

“Every day my lord sends me a book,” retorted the sceptical Ahmet, “and each brings me happiness. Also it is common talk that at this time there come messengers carrying bags of silver and salt to pay men according to their services.”

Undismayed she tried her last shot.

“You have a crooked finger which none can straighten--behold!”

She took his hand in hers and pressed the injured phlange. A sharp pain shot up his arm and he winced, pulling back his hand--but the year-old dislocation which had defied the effort of the coast doctor was straightened out, and though the movement was exquisitely painful he could bend it.

“I see you are a true witch,” he said, greatly impressed, for a native has a horror of deformity of any kind, and he sent back word of the phenomenon to Sanders.

Sanders at the same time was in receipt of other news which alternately pleased him and filled him with panic. The mail had come in by fast launch and had brought Captain Hamilton of the Houssas a very bulky letter written in a feminine hand. He had broken the glad news to Commissioner Sanders, but that gentleman was not certain in his mind whether the startling intelligence conveyed by the letter was good or bad.

“I’m sure the country will suit her,” he said, “this part of the country at any rate--but what will Bones say?”

“Bones!” repeated Captain Hamilton scornfully. “What the dickens does it matter what Bones says?”

Nevertheless, he went to the sea-end of the verandah, and his roar rivalled the thunder of the surf.

“Bones!”

There was no answer and for an excellent reason.

Sanders came out of the bungalow, his helmet on the back of his head, a cheroot tilted dizzily.

“Where is he?” he asked.

Hamilton turned.

“I asked him to--at least I didn’t ask him, he volunteered--to peg out a trench line.”

“Expect an invasion?” asked Sanders.

Hamilton grinned.

“Bones does,” he said. “He’s full of the idea, and offered to give me tips on the way a trench should be dug--he’s feeling rotten about things ... you know what I mean. His regiment was at Mons.”

Sanders nodded.

“I understand,” he said quietly. “And you ... you’re a jolly good soldier, Hamilton--how do you feel about it all?”

Hamilton shrugged his shoulders.

“They would have taken me for the Cameroons, but somebody had to stay,” he said quietly. “After all, it is one’s business to ... to do one’s job in the station of life to which it has pleased God to call him. This is my work ... here.”

Sanders laid his hand on the other’s shoulder.

“That’s the game as it should be played,” he said, and his blue eyes were as soft and as tender as a woman’s. “There is no war here--we are the keepers of the King’s peace, Hamilton.”

“It’s rotten...”

“I know--I feel that way myself. We’re out of it--the glory of it--the chance of it--the tragedy of it. And there are others. Think of the men in India eating their hearts out ... praying for the order that will carry them from the comfort of their lives to the misery and the death--and the splendour, I grant you--of war.”

He sighed and looked wistfully to the blue sea.

Hamilton beckoned a Houssa corporal who was crossing the garden of the Residency.

“Ho, Mustaf,” he said, in his queer coast Arabic, “where shall I look for my lord Tibbetti?”

The corporal turned and pointed to the woods which begin at the back of the Residency and carry without a break for three hundred miles.

“Lord, he went there carrying many strange things--also there went with him Ali Abid, his servant.”

Hamilton reached through an open window of the bungalow and fished out his helmet with his walking-stick.

“We’ll find Bones,” he said grimly; “he’s been gone three hours and he’s had time to re-plan Verdun.”

It took some time to discover the working party, but when it was found the trouble was well repaid.

Bones was stretched on a canvas chair under the shade of a big Isisi palm. His helmet was tipped forward so that the brim rested on the bridge of his nose, his thin red arms were folded on his breast, and their gentle rise and fall testified to his shame. Two pegs had been driven in, and between them a string sagged half-heartedly.

Curled up under a near-by bush was, presumably, Ali Abid--presumably, because all that was visible was a very broad stretch of brown satin skin which showed between the waistline of a pair of white cotton trousers and a duck jacket.

They 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.”