Chapter IV: Bones and the Wireless

Ko-boru, the headman of Bingini, called his relations together for a solemn family conference.

The lower river folk play an inconsiderable rôle in the politics of the Territories, partly because they are so near to headquarters that there is no opportunity for any of those secret preparations which precede all native intrigues, great or small, and partly because the lower river people are so far removed from the turbulent elements of the upper river that they are not swayed by the cyclonic emotions of the Isisi, the cold and deliberate desire for slaughter which is characteristically Akasavian, or the electrical decisions of the Outer N’gombi.

But they had their crises.

To Bingini came all the notables of the district who claimed kinship with Ko-boru, and they sat in a great circle about the headman’s hut, alternately eyeing the old headman and their stout relative, his daughter.

“All my relations shall know this,” began Ko-boru, after Okmimi, the witch-doctor, had formally burnt away the devils and ghosts that fringe all large assemblies, “that a great shame has come to us, every one, because of Yoka-m’furi. For this Yoka is to Sandi as a brother, and guides his little ship up and down the river, and because of this splendid position I gave him my own daughter by the first of my wives.”

“S’m-m!” murmured the council in agreement.

“Also I built him a hut and gave him a garden, where his wife might work, and he has sat at family palavers. Now, I tell you that Yoka-m’furi is an evil man, for he has left my daughter, and has found another wife in the upper river, and he comes no more to this village, and my daughter weeps all day.

“For three seasons he has not been to this village; when the moon comes again, it will be four.” He said this with proper significance, and the flat face of the melancholy girl by his side puckered and creased miserably before she opened her large mouth to wail her woe.

For the man who deliberately separates himself from his wife for four seasons and does not spend twenty-four hours--”from sunrise to moonset” in her village is automatically divorced and freed from all responsibility. This is the custom of all people from the lands of the Great King to the sea.

“Now, I have had a dream,” Ko-boru went on, “and in this dream it was told me that I should call you all together, and that I and the chief of my councillors and friends should go to Sandi and tell him what is true.”

“Brother and uncle,” said Bechimi of G’lara, “I will go with you, for once I spoke to Sandi and he spoke to me, and because of his cunning memory he will recall Bechimi, who picked up his little black stick, when it fell, and gave it to him.”

Five were chosen to accompany Ko-boru, and they took canoe and travelled for less than five miles to the Residency.

Sanders was entertaining Patricia Hamilton with stories of native feuds, when the unexpected deputation squatted in the sun before the verandah.

“O Ko-boru,” hailed Sanders, “why do you come?”

Ko-boru was all for a long and impressive palaver, but recognized a certain absence of encouragement in the Commissioner’s tone. Therefore he came straight to the point.

“Now, you are our father and our mother, Sandi,” he said, in conclusion, “and when you speak, all wonders happen. Also you have very beautiful friends, Militini, who speak a word and set his terrible soldiers moving like leopards towards a kill, and Tibbetti, the young one who is innocent and simple. So I say to you, Sandi, that if you speak one word to Yoka, he will come back to my daughter, his wife.”

Sanders stood by the rail of the stoep and looked down upon the spokesman.

“I hear strange things, Ko-boru,” he said quietly. “They tell me stories of a woman with many lovers and an evil tongue; and once there came to me Yoka with a wounded head, for this daughter of yours is very quick in her anger.”

“Lord,” said the flustered Ko-boru, “such things happen even in love.”

“All things happen in love,” said Sanders, with a little smile, “and, if it is to be, Yoka will return. Also, if it is to be, he will not go back to the woman, and she will be free. This palaver is finished.”

“Lord,” pleaded Ko-boru, “the woman will do no more angry things. Let him come back from sunrise to moonset----”

“This palaver is finished,” repeated Sanders.

On their way back to Bingini the relatives of Ko-boru made a plot. It was the first plot that had been hatched in the shadow of headquarters for twenty years.

“Would it be indiscreet to ask what your visitors wanted?” asked the girl, as the crestfallen deputation was crossing the square to their canoe.

“It was a marriage palaver,” replied Sanders, with a little grimace, “and I was being requested to restore a husband to a temperamental lady who has a passion for shying cook-pots at her husband when she is annoyed.”

The girl’s laughing eyes were fixed upon his.

“Poor Mr. Sanders!” she said, with mock seriousness.

“Don’t be sorry for me,” smiled Sanders. “I’m rather domestic, really, and I’m interested in this case because the man concerned is my steersman--the best on the river, and a capital all-round man. Besides that,” he went on seriously, “I regard them all as children of mine. It is right that a man who shirks his individual responsibilities to the race should find a family to ‘father.’”

“Why do you?” she asked, after a little pause.

“Why do I what?”

“Shirk your responsibilities,” she said. “This is a healthy and a delightful spot: a woman might be very happy here.”

There was an awkward silence.

“I’m afraid I’ve been awfully impertinent,” said Patricia, hurriedly rising, “but to a woman there is a note of interrogation behind every bachelor--especially nice bachelors--and the more ‘confirmed’ he is, the bigger the question mark.”

Sanders rose to her.

“One of these days I shall do something rash,” he threatened, with that shy laugh of his. “Here is your little family coming.”

Bones and Hamilton were discussing something heatedly, and justice was on the side of Lieutenant Tibbetts, if one could judge by the frequency with which he stopped and gesticulated.

“It really is too bad,” said the annoyed Hamilton, as he mounted the steps to the stoep, followed by Bones, who, to do him justice, did not adopt the attitude of a delinquent, but was, on the contrary, injured virtue personified.

“What is too bad, dear?” asked the girl sympathetically.

“A fortnight ago,” said Hamilton, “I told this silly ass----”

“Your jolly old brother is referrin’ to me, dear lady,” explained Bones.

“Who else could I be referring to?” demanded the other truculently. “I told him to have all the company accounts ready by to-morrow. You know, sir, that the paymaster is coming down from Administration to check ‘em, and will you believe me, sir”--he glared at Bones, who immediately closed his eyes resignedly--”would you believe me that, when I went to examine those infernal accounts, they were all at sixes and sevens?”

“Threes an’ nines, dear old officer,” murmured Bones, waking up, “the matter in dispute being a trifle of thirty-nine dollars, which I’ve generously offered to make up out of my own pocket.”

He beamed round as one who expected applause.

“And on the top of this,” fumed Hamilton, “he talks of taking Pat for an early morning picnic to the village island!”

“Accompanied by the jolly old accounts,” corrected Bones. “Do me justice, sir and brother-officer. I offered to take the books with me, an’ render a lucid and convincin’ account of my stewardship.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” snarled Hamilton, stamping into the bungalow.

“Isn’t he naughty?” said Bones admiringly.

“Now, Bones,” warned the girl, “I shan’t go unless you keep your word with Alec.”

Bones drew himself up and saluted.

“Dear old friend,” he said proudly, “put your faith in Bones.”

“H.M. Launch No. 36 (Territories),” as it was officially described on the stores record, had another name, which she earned in her early days through certain eccentricities of construction. Though she might not in justice be called the Wiggle any longer, yet the Wiggle she was from one end of the river to the other, and even native men called her “Komfuru,” which means “that which does not run straight.”

It had come to be recognized that the Wiggle was the especial charge of Lieutenant Tibbetts. Bones himself was the first to recognize this right. There were moments when he inferred that the Wiggle’s arrival on the station at the time he was making his own first appearance was something more than a coincidence.

She was not, in the strictest sense of the word, a launch, for she possessed a square, open dining saloon and two tiny cabins amidships. Her internal works were open to the light of day, and her engineer lived in the engine-room up to his waist and on deck from his waist up, thus demonstrating the possibility of being in two places at once.

The Wiggle, moreover, possessed many attributes which are denied to other small steamers. She had, for example, a Maxim gun on her tiny forecastle. She had a siren of unusual power and diabolical tone, she was also fitted with a big motor-horn, both of which appendages were Bones’s gift to his flagship. The motor-horn may seem superfluous, but when the matter is properly explained, you will understand the necessity for some less drastic method of self-advertisement than the siren.

The first time the siren had been fitted Bones had taken the Wiggle through “the Channel.” Here the river narrows and deepens, and the current runs at anything from five to seven knots an hour. Bones was going up stream, and met the Bolalo Mission steamer coming down. She had dipped her flag to the Wiggle’s blue ensign, and Bones had replied with two terrific blasts on his siren.

After that the Wiggle went backwards, floating with the current all ways, from broadside on to stern first, for in those two blasts Bones had exhausted the whole of his steam reserve.

She was also equipped with wireless. There was an “aerial” and an apparatus which Bones had imported from England at a cost of twelve pounds, and which was warranted to receive messages from two hundred miles distant. There was also a book of instructions. Bones went to his hut with the book and read it. His servant found him in bed the next morning, sleeping like a child, with his hand resting lightly upon the second page.

Sanders and Hamilton both took a hand at fixing the Wiggle’s wireless. The only thing they were all quite certain about was that there ought to be a wire somewhere. So they stretched the aerial from the funnel to the flagstaff at the stern of the boat, and then addressed themselves to the less simple solution of “making it work.”

They tried it for a week, and gave it up in despair.

“They’ve had you, Bones,” said Hamilton. “It doesn’t ‘went.’ Poor old Bones!”

“Your pity, dear old officer, is offensive,” said Bones stiffly, “an’ I don’t mind tellin’ you that I’ve a queer feelin’--I can’t explain what it is, except that I’m a dooce of a psychic--that that machine is goin’ to be jolly useful.”

But though Bones worked day and night, read the book of instructions from cover to cover, and took the whole apparatus to pieces, examining each part under a strong magnifying glass, he never succeeded either in transmitting or receiving a message, and the machine was repacked and stored in the spare cabin, and was never by any chance referred to, except by Hamilton in his most unpleasant moments.

Bones took an especial delight in the Wiggle; it was his very own ship, and he gave her his best personal attention.

It was Bones who ordered from London especially engraved notepaper headed “H. M. S. Komfuru“--the native name sounded more dignified than Wiggle, and more important than “Launch 36.” It was Bones who installed the little dynamo which--when it worked--lit the cabins and even supplied power for a miniature searchlight. It was Bones who had her painted Service grey, and would have added another funnel if Hamilton had not detected the attempted aggrandizement. Bones claimed that she was dustproof, waterproof, and torpedo-proof, and Hamilton had voiced his regret that she was not also fool-proof.

At five o’clock the next morning, when the world was all big hot stars and shadows, and there was no sound but the whisper of the running river and the “ha-a-a-a--ha-a-a-a” of breakers, Bones came from his hut, crossed the parade-ground, and, making his way by the light of a lantern along the concrete quay--it was the width of an average table--dropped on to the deck and kicked the custodian of the Wiggle to wakefulness.

Bones’s satellite was one Ali Abid, who was variously described as Moor, Egyptian, Tripolitan, and Bedouin, but was by all ethnological indications a half-breed Kano, who had spent the greater part of his life in the service of a professor of bacteriology. This professor was something of a purist, and the association with Ali Abid, plus a grounding in the elementary subjects which are taught at St. Joseph’s Mission School, Cape Coast Castle, had given Ali a gravity of demeanour and a splendour of vocabulary which many better favoured than he might have envied.

“Arise,” quoth Bones, in the cracked bass which he employed whenever he felt called upon to deliver his inaccurate versions of Oriental poets--

“Arise, for morning in the bowl of night

Has chucked a stone to put the stars to flight.

And lo! and lo! ... Get up, Ali; the caravan is moving.

Oh, make haste!”

(“Omar will never be dead so long as Bones quotes him,” Hamilton once said; “he simply couldn’t afford to be dead and leave it to Bones!”)

Ali rose, blinking and shivering, for the early morning was very cold, and he had been sleeping under an old padded dressing-gown which Bones had donated.

“Muster all the hands,” said Bones, setting his lantern on the deck.

“Sir,” said Ali slowly, “the subjects are not at our disposition. Your preliminary instructions presupposed that you had made necessary arrangements re personnel.”

Bones scratched his head.

“Dash my whiskers,” he said, in his annoyance, “didn’t I tell you that I was taking the honourable lady for a trip? Didn’t I tell you, you jolly old slacker, to have everything ready by daybreak? Didn’t I issue explicit an’ particular instructions about grub?”

“Sir,” said Ali, “you didn’t.”

“Then,” said Bones wrathfully, “why the dickens do I think I have?”

“Sir,” said Ali, “some subjects, when enjoying refreshing coma, possess delirium, hallucinations, highly imaginative, which dissipate when the subject recovers consciousness, but retain in brain cavity illusory reminiscences.”