Part 13

"Go to the Akasava country, and there you will find Ofesi, a chief of the village Mi-lanti. Watch him, for he is an evil man. On the day that he moves against me and my people you shall judge whether I can come in time with my soldiers. If there is time send for me: but if he moves swiftly you shall shoot him dead and you shall not be blamed. Go with God."

"Master," said Ahmed, "Ofesi is already in hell."

If all reports worked out, and they certainly tallied, Ofesi, the predestined chief, gave no offence. He rebuilt his city, choosing higher ground and following a long and unexpected hunting trip, which took him to the edge of the Akasava country, and he projected a visit of love and harmony to Bosambo.

He even sent swift couriers to Sanders to ask permission for the ceremonial, though such permission was wholly unnecessary. Sanders granted the request, delaying the deputation until he had sent his own messengers to Bosambo.

So on a bright June morning Ofesi set forth on his mission, his two and twenty canoes painted red, and even the paddles newly burnt to fantastic and complimentary designs; and he came to the Ochori and was met by Bosambo, a profound sceptic but outwardly pleasant.

"I see you," said Ofesi, "I see you, lord Bosambo, also your brave and beautiful people; yet I come in peace and it grieves me that you should meet me with so many spears."

For in truth the beach bristled a steel welcome and three fighting regiments of the Ochori, gallantly arrayed, were ranked in hollow square, the fourth side of which was the river.

"Lord Ofesi," said Bosambo suavely, "this is the white man's way of doing honour and, as you know, I have much white blood in my veins, being related to the English Prime Minister."

He surveyed the two-and-twenty canoes with their twenty paddlers to each, and duly noted that each paddler carried his fighting spears as a matter of course.

That Ofesi had any sinister design upon the stronghold of the Ochori may be dismissed as unlikely. He was cast in no heroic mould, and abhorred unnecessary risk, for destiny requires some assistance.

He had brought his spears for display rather than for employment. Willy-nilly he must stack them now--an unpleasant operation, reminiscent of another stacking under the cold eye of Sanders.

So it may be said that the _rapprochement_ between the Ochori and the Akasava chief began inauspiciously. Bosambo led the way to his guest-house--new-thatched as is the custom.

There was a great feast in Ofesi's honour, and a dance of girls--every village contributing its chief dancer for the event. Next day there was a palaver with sacrifices of fowl and beast, and blood friendships were sworn fluently. Bosambo and Ofesi embraced before all the people assembled, and ate salt from the same dish.

"Now I will tell you all my business, my brother," said Ofesi that night. "To-morrow I go back to my people with your good word, and I shall speak of you by day and night because of your noble heart."

"I also will have no rest," said Bosambo, "till I have journeyed all over this land, speaking about my wonderful brother Ofesi."

With a word Ofesi dismissed his counsellors, and Bosambo, accepting the invitation, sent away his headmen.

"Now I will tell you," said Ofesi.

And what he said, what flood of ego-oratory, what promises, what covert threats, provided Bosambo with reminiscences for long afterwards.

"Yet," he concluded, "though all things have moved to make me what I am, yet there is much I have to learn, and from none can I learn so well as from you, my brother."

"That is very true," said Bosambo, and meant it.

"Now," Ofesi went on to his peroration, "the king of the Akasava is dying and all men are agreed that I shall be king in his place, therefore I would learn to the utmost grain all the secrets of kingship. Therefore, since I cannot sit with you, I ask you, lord Bosambo, to give a home to Tolinobo, my headman, that he may sit for a year in the shadow of your wisdom and tell me the many beautiful things you say."

Bosambo looked thoughtfully at Tolinobo, the headman, a shifty fisherman promoted to that position, and somewhat deficient in sanity, as Bosambo judged.

"He shall sit with me," said Bosambo at length, "and be as my own son, sleeping in a hut by mine, and I will treat him as if he were my brother."

There was a fleeting gleam of satisfaction in Ofesi's eye as he rose to embrace his blood-friend; but then he did not know how Bosambo treated his brother.

The Akasava chief and his two and twenty canoes paddled homeward at daybreak, and Bosambo saw them off.

When they were gone, he turned to his headman.

"Tell me, Solonkinini," he said, "what have we done with this Tolinobo who stays with us?"

"Lord, we build him a new hut this morning in your lordship's shadow."

Bosambo nodded.

"First," he said, "you shall take him to the secret place near the Crocodile Pool and stake him out. Presently I will come, and we will ask him some questions."

"Lord, he will not answer," said the headman. "I myself have spoken with him."

"He shall answer me," said Bosambo, significantly, "and you shall build a fire and make very hot your spears, for I think this Tolinobo has something he will be glad to tell."

Bosambo's prediction was justified by fact.

Ofesi was not half-way home, happy in his success, when a blubbering Tolinobo, stretched ignominiously on the ground, spoke with a lamentable lack of reserve on all manner of private matters, being urged thereto by a red hot spear-head which Bosambo held much too near his face for comfort.

* * * * *

At about this time came Jim Greel, an American adventurer, and Francis E. Coulson, a citizen of the world. They came into Sanders's territory unwillingly, for they were bound, via the French river which skirted the north of the N'gombi land, for German West Africa. There was in normal times a bit of a stream which connected the great river with the Frenchi river. It was, according to a facetious government surveyor, navigable for balloons and paper boats except once in a decade when a mild spring in the one thousand-miles distant mountains coincided with heavy rains in the Isisi watershed. Given the coincidence the tiny dribble of rush-choked water achieved the dignity of riverhood. It was bad luck that Jim and Coulson hit an exceptional season.

Keeping to the left bank, and moving only by night--they had reason for this--the adventurers followed the course of the stream which ordinarily was not on the map, and they were pardonably and almost literally at sea.

Two long nights they worked their crazy little steamer through an unknown territory without realising that it was unknown. They avoided such villages as they passed, shutting off steam and dowsing all lights till they drifted beyond sight and hearing.

At last they reached a stage in their enterprise where the maintenance of secrecy was a matter of some personal danger, and they looked around in the black night for assistance.

"Looks like a village over there, Jim," said Coulson, and the steersman nodded.

"There's shoal water here," he said grimly, "and the forehold is up to water-level."

"Leakin'?"

"Not exactly leakin'," said Jim carefully; "but there's no bottom to the forepart of this tub."

Coulson swore softly at the African night. The velvet darkness had fallen on them suddenly, and it was a case of tie-up or go on--Jim decided to go on.

They had struck a submerged log and ripped away the bottom of the tiny compartment that was magniloquently called "No. 1 hold"; the bulkhead of Nos. 1 and 2 was of the thinnest steel and was bulging perceptibly.

Coulson did not know this, but Jim did.

Now he turned the prow of the ancient steamer to the dark shore, and the revolving paddle-wheels made an expiring effort.

Somewhere on the river bank a voice called to them in the Akasava tongue; they saw the fires of the village, and black shadows passing before them; they heard women laughing.

Jim turned his head and gave an order to one of his naked crew, and the man leapt overboard with a thin rope hawser.

Then the ripped keel of the little boat took the sand and she grounded.

Jim lit his pipe from a lantern that hung in the deck cabin behind him, wiped his streaming forehead with the back of his hand, and spoke rapidly in the Akasava tongue to the little crowd who had gathered on the beach. He spoke mechanically, warning all and sundry for the safety of their immortal souls not to slip his hawser! warning them that if he lost so much as a deck rivet he would flay alive the thief, and ended by commending his admiring audience to M'shimba M'shamba, Bim-bi, O'kili, and such local devils as he could call to his tongue. "That's let me out," he said, and waded ashore through the shallow water as one too much overcome by the big tragedies of life to care very much one way or another whether he was wet or dry.

He strode up the shelving beach and was led by a straggling group of villagers to the headman's hut to make inquiries, and came back to the boat with unpleasant news.

Coulson had brought her nose to the sand, and by a brushwood fire that the men of the village had lit upon the beach, the damage was plainly to be seen.

The tiny hull had torn like brown paper, and part of the cause--a stiff branch of gun-wood--still protruded from the hole.

"We're in Sanders's territory, if it's all the same to you," said Jim gloomily. "The damnation old Frenchi river is in spruit and we've come about eighty miles on the wrong track."

Coulson, kneeling by the side of the boat, a short, black briar clutched between his even white teeth, looked up with a grin.

"'Sande catchee makee hell,'" quoted he. "Do you remember the Chink shaver who used to run the Angola women up to the old king for Bannister Fish?"

Jim said nothing. He took a roll of twist from his pocket, bit off a section, and chewed philosophically.

"There's no slavery outfit in this packet," he said. "I guess even old man Fish wouldn't fool 'round in this land--may the devil grind him for bone-meal!"

There was no love lost between the amiable adventurers and Mr. Bannister Fish. That gentleman himself, sitting in close conference with Ofesi not fifty miles from whence the _Grasshopper_ lay, would have been extremely glad to know that her owners were where they were.

"Fish is out in these territories for good," said Jim; "but it'll do us no good--our not bein' Fish, I mean, if Sandi comes nosing round lookin' for traders' licences--somehow I don't want anybody to inspect our cargo."

Coulson nodded as he wielded a heavy hammer on the damaged plate.

"I guess he'll know all right," Jim went on. "You can't keep these old _lokalis_ quiet--listen to the joyous news bein', so to speak, flashed forth to the expectant world."

Coulson suspended his operations. Clear and shrill came the rattle of the _lokali_ tapping its message:

"Tom-te tom, tom-te tom, tommitty tommitty tommitty-tom."

"There she goes," said the loquacious Jim, complacently. "Two white men of suspicious appearance have arrived in town--Court papers please copy."

Coulson grinned again. He was working his hammer deftly, and already the offending branch had disappeared.

"A ha'porth of cement in the morning," he said, "and she's the Royal yacht."

Jim sniffed.

"It'll take many ha'porths of cement to make her anything but a big intake pipe," he said. He put his hand on the edge of the boat and leapt aboard. Abaft the deck-house were two tiny cupboards of cabins, the length of a man's body and twice his width. Into one of these he dived, and returned shortly afterwards with a small, worn portmanteau, patched and soiled. He jumped down over the bows to the beach, first handing the piece of baggage down to the engineer of the little boat. It was so heavy that the man nearly dropped it.

"What's the idea?" Coulson mopped the sweat from his forehead with a pocket-handkerchief, and turned his astonished gaze to the other.

"'Tis the loot," said Jim significantly. "We make a cache of this to-night lest a worse thing happen.

"Oh, God, this man!" prayed Coulson, appealing heavenward. "With the eyes of the whole dam' barbarian rabble directed on him, he stalks through the wilderness with his grip full of gold and his heart full of innocent guile!"

Jim refilled his pipe leisurely from a big, leather pouch that hung at his waist before he replied. "Coulson," he said between puffs, "in the language of that ridiculous vaudeville artiste we saw before we quit London, you may have brains in your head, but you've got rabbit's blood in your feet. There's no occasion for getting scared, only I surmise that one of your fellow-countrymen will be prowling around here long before the bows of out stately craft take the water like a thing of life, and since he is the Lord High Everything in this part of the world, and can turn out a man's pocket without so much as a 'damn ye,' I am for removing all trace of the Frenchi Creed River diggings."

Coulson had paused in his work, and sat squatting on his heels, his eyes fixed steadily on his partner's. He was a good-looking young man of twenty-seven, a few years the junior of the other, whose tanned face was long and thin, but by no means unpleasant.

"What does it matter?" asked Coulson after a while. "He can only ask where we got the dust, and we needn't tell him; and if we do we've got enough here to keep us in comfort all our days."

Jim smiled.

"Suppose he holds this gold?" he asked quietly. "Suppose he just sends his spies along to discover where the river digging is--and suppose he finds it is in French territory and that there is a prohibitive export duty from the French country. Oh! there's a hundred suppositions, and they're all unpleasant."

Coulson rose stiffly.

"I think we'll take the risk of the boat foundering, Jim," he said. "Put the grip back."

Jim hesitated, then with a nod he swung the portmanteau aboard and followed. A few minutes later he was doubled up in the perfectly inadequate space of No. 1 hold, swabbing out the ooze of the river, and singing in a high falsetto the love song of a mythical Bedouin.

It was past midnight when the two men, tired, aching, and cheerful, sought their beds.

"If Sanders turns up," shouted Jim as he arranged his mosquito curtain (the shouting was necessary, since he was addressing his companion through a matchboard partition between the two cabins), "you've got to lie, Coulson."

"I hate lying," grumbled Coulson loudly; "but I suppose we shall have to?"

"Betcher!" yawned the other, and said his prayers with lightning rapidity.

Daylight brought dismay to the two voyagers.

The hole in the hull was not alone responsible for the flooded hold. There was a great gash in her keel--the plate had been ripped away by some snag or snags unknown. Coulson looked at Jim, and Jim returned the despairing gaze.

"A canoe for mine," said Jim after a while. "Me for the German river and so home. That is the way I intended moving, and that is the way I go."

Coulson shook his head.

"Flight!" he said briefly. "You can explain being in Sanders's territory, but you can't explain the bolt--stick it out!"

All that morning the two men laboured in the hot sun to repair the damage. Fortunately the cement was enough to stop up the bottom leak, and there was enough over to make a paste with twigs and sun-dried sand to stop the other. But there was no blinking the fact that the protection afforded was of the frailest. The veriest twig embedded in a sandbank would be sufficient to pierce the flimsy "plating." This much the two men saw when the repairs were completed at the end of the day. The hole in the bow could only be effectively dealt with by the removal of one plate and the substitution of another, "and that," said Jim, "can hardly happen."

The German river was eighty miles upstream and a flooded stream that ran five knots an hour at that. Allow a normal speed of nine knots to the tiny _Grasshopper_, and you have a twenty hours' run at best.

"The river's full of floatin' timber," said Jim wrathfully, eyeing the swift sweep of the black waters, "an' we stand no better chance of gettin' anywhere except to the bottom; it's a new plate or nothing."

Thus matters stood with a battered _Grasshopper_ high and dry on the shelving beach of the Akasava village, and two intrepid but unhappy gold smugglers discussing ways and means, when complications occurred which did much to make the life of Mr. Commissioner Sanders unbearable.

* * * * *

There was a woman of the Akasava who bore the name of Ufambi, which means a "bad woman." She had a lover--indeed, she had many, but the principal was a hunter named Logi. He was a tall, taciturn man, and his teeth were sharpened to two points. He was broad-shouldered, his hair was plastered with clay, and he wore a cloak that was made from the tails of monkeys. For this reason he was named Logi N'kemi, that is to say, Logi the Monkey.

He had a hut far in the woods, three days' journey, and in this wood were several devils; therefore he had few visitors.

Ufambi loved this man exceedingly, and as fervently hated her husband, who was a creature of Ofesi. Also, he was not superior to the use of the stick.

One day Ufambi annoyed him and he beat her. She flew at him like a wild cat and bit him, but he shook her off and beat her the more, till she ran from the hut to the cool and solitary woods, for she was not afraid of devils.

Here her lover found her, sitting patiently by the side of the forest path, her well-moulded arms hugging her knees, her chin sunk, a watchful, brooding and an injured woman.

They sat together and talked, and the woman told him all there was to be told, and Logi the Monkey listened in silence.

"Furthermore," she went on, "he has buried beneath the floor of the hut certain treasures given to him by white men, which you may take."

She said this pleadingly, for he had shown no enthusiasm in the support of her plan.

"Yet how can I kill your husband," said Logi, carefully, "and if I do kill him and Sandi comes here, how may I escape his cruel vengeance? I think it would be better if you gave him death in his chop, for then none would think evilly of me."

She was not distressed at his patent selfishness. It was understandable that a man should seek safety for himself, but she had no intention of carrying out her lover's plan.

She returned to her husband, and found him so far amiable that she escaped a further beating. Moreover, he was communicative.

"Woman," he said, "to-morrow I go a long journey because of certain things I have seen, and you go with me. In a secret place, as you know, I have hidden my new canoe, and when it is dark you shall take as much fish and my two little dogs and sit in the canoe waiting for me."

"I will do this thing, lord," she said meekly.

He looked at her for a long time.

"Also," he said after a while, "you shall tell no man that I am leaving, for I do not desire that Sandi shall know, though," he added, "if all things be true that Ofesi says, he will know nothing."

"I will do this as you tell me, lord," said the woman.

He rose from the floor of the hut where he had been squatting and went out of the hut.

"Come!" he said graciously, and she followed him to the beach and joined the crowd of villagers who watched two white men labouring under difficulties.

By and by she saw her husband detach himself from the group and make his cautious way to where the white men were.

Now Bikilari--such was the husband's name--was a N'gombi man, and the N'gombi folk are one of two things, and more often than not, both. They are either workers in iron or thieves, and Jim, looking up at the man, felt a little spasm of satisfaction at the sight of the lateral face marks which betrayed his nationality.

"Ho, man!" said Jim in the vernacular, "what are you that you stand in my sun?"

"I am a poor man, lord," said Bikilari, "and I am the slave of all white men: now I can do things which ignorant men cannot, for I can take iron and bend it by heat, also I can bend it without heat, as my fathers and my tribe have done since the world began."

Coulson watched the man keenly, for he was no lover of the N'gombi.

"Try him out, Jim," he said, so they gave Bikilari a hammer and some strips of steel, and all the day he worked strengthening the rotten bow of the _Grasshopper_.

In the evening, tired and hungry, he went back to his hut for food; but his wife had watched him too faithfully for his comfort, and the cooking-pot was cold and empty. Bikilari beat her with his stick, and for two hours she sobbed and blew upon the embers of the fire alternately whilst my lord's fish stewed and spluttered over her bent head.

* * * * *

Jim was a good sleeper but a light one. He woke on the very smell of danger. Here was something more tangible than scent--a dog-like scratching at his door. In the faint moonlight he saw a figure crouching in the narrow alley-way, saw, too, by certain conformations, that it was a woman, and drew an uncharitable conclusion. Yet, since she desired secrecy, he was willing to observe her wishes. He slid back the gauze door and flickered an electric lamp (most precious possession, to be used with all reserve and economy). She shrank back at this evidence of magic and breathed an entreaty.

"What do you want?" he asked in a low voice.

"Lord," she answered, her voice muffled, "if you desire your life, do not stay here."

Jim thrust his face nearer to the woman's.

"Say what you must say very quickly," he said.

"Lord," she began again, "my husband is Bikilari, a worker in iron. He is the man of Ofesi, and to-night Ofesi sends his killers to do his work upon all white men and upon all chiefs who thwart him. Also upon you because you are white and there is treasure in your ship."

"Wait," said Jim, and turned to tap on Coulson's door. There was no need. Coulson was out of bed at the first sound of whispering and now stood in the doorway, the moonlight reflected in a cold blue line on the revolver he held in his hand.

"It may be a fake--but there's no reason why it should be," he said when the story was told. "We'll chance the hole in the bow."

Jim ran forward and woke the sleeping engineer, and came back with the first crackle of burning wood in the furnace.

He found the woman waiting.

"What is your name?" he asked.

She stood with her back to the tiny rail, an easy mark for the man who had followed her and now crouched in the shadow of the hull. He could reach up and touch her. He slipped out his long N'gombi hunting knife and felt the point.

"Lord," said the woman, "I am----"

Then she slipped down to the deck.

Coulson fired twice at the fleeing Bikilari, and missed him. Logi, the lover, leapt at him from the beach but fell before a quick knife-thrust.

Bikilari reached the bushes in safety and plunged into the gloom--and into the arms of Ahmed Ali, a swift, silent man, who caught the knife arm in one hand and broke the neck of the murderer with the other--for Ahmed Ali was a famous wrestler in the Kono country.

The city was aroused, naked feet pattered through the street. Jim and Coulson, lying flat on the bow of the steamer, held the curious at bay.

Two hours they lay thus whilst the cold boilers generated energy. Then the paddle wheel threshed desperately astern, and the _Grasshopper_ dragged herself to deep water.

A figure hailed them from the bank in Swaheli.

"Lord," it said, "go you south and meet Sandi--northward is death, for the Isisi are up and the Akasava villagers are in their canoes--also all white men in this land are dead, save Sandi."

"Who are you?" megaphoned Jim, and the answer came faintly as the boat drifted to mid-stream.

"I am Ahmed Ali, the servant of Sandi, whom may God preserve!"