CHAPTER VI

THE COMING OF THE OKKY-MEN

The attack on Smooth River factory did not take place without due warning. It seemed that a large caravan of native merchants from the hinterland had come through the Okky country with a fine cargo of produce since the King had stopped the roads. Whether they had cut new roads through the bush for themselves, or fought their way past the obstructing ju-ju, they did not explain; they arrived at the factory with kernels, a few tusks of discolored ivory, a few quills of water-worn gold, and a fine parcel of high-grade rubber, which were duly valued; they took cloth, six flint-lock guns, a case or two of gin, and the balance in pink Kola-nuts by way of payment; and with these on the skulls of their carriers, they marched away along the Beach and out of this history.

Then presently there came down envoys from the King of Okky demanding with a fine inconsistency that O'Neill and Craven's factory should pay his Majesty the transit blackmail which he had been unable to collect himself. Carter was sent for, post-haste, from Malla-Nulla, and was at first minded to tell those envoys to go to a kingdom which repute says is even hotter than West Africa. But thoughts of Laura living there by herself, and a dread of the horrors of native war made him offer a compromise. "Open the roads," said he, "and we'll pay up these fellows' dues, though your King knows perfectly well he hasn't an atom of claim on this factory. It's the custom for traders to pay for going through a country if they can't avoid paying; they never pay once they are through; and never, never, never, throughout all the wicked history of Africa has there been a case of an English factory being fool enough to pay toll which its casual customers have slipped through without paying. But, as I say, I am ready to meet you in the matter. Open the roads and I'll dash you this amount you ask for."

Kwaka, the head envoy, a big, fine, bold-eyed Haûsa, requested that the money might be handed them there and then.

"Not one sixpence," said Carter, "till the roads are opened."

The Haûsa was a professional soldier, and here he could see was going to be a chance of working at his trade. He gleefully delivered the King of Okky's ultimatum. If the tribute was not paid, the King would withdraw his permission for O'Neill and Craven's factories to exist on the Coast.

"Tell your old King," said the Englishman contemptuously, "that he may have authority over his own filthy mud-villages inland, but his law does not carry along the Coast, as he knows full well. The Coast is the white man's."

Things were going exactly as Kwaka could have wished. The man with the red head was warming up nicely. "If you fight when we come down to the factory," said Kwaka, "I will see to it that you are crucified separately. I should like to take the woman who lives here into my own harem, but the King has bespoken her already."

"You," said Carter savagely, "a Moslem, ought to know shame for living in the employ of pagans like Okky-men. If you come back here, my first shot shall be for you, and after you are dead I will have that done to your face with the white man's doctor's tools as shall forever spoil its beauty. So that when the Prophet takes you up into Paradise, even the least of the houris will shrink from you and hide her eyes from all sight of you in the folds of her green robe. Just you stick that in your memory, Mr. Kwaka, and don't come boasting 'round here. Observe, I am a man of my hands: I can make white iron burn."

He pulled a length of magnesium wire from his pocket and lit it with a match. The big Haûsa stared owlishly at the fierce white flame.

"That is the glare of Gehenna," said Carter, "into which if you come to Smooth River again you will presently descend, after being cast out from Paradise because of the reason I mentioned. You have now my permission to depart. And I wonder," he added to himself, "if my Mohammedan theology is fairly correct. Kwaka's swallowed it right enough, but if he hands it along to a mullah, he may find a flaw, and we shall have the whole brood of them down about our ears in half no-time."

However the portent was sufficiently startling for the moment. Kwaka argued that a man who could make iron burn could doubtless (as he claimed) spoil the good looks of a True Believer by some other of his infernal arts, and therefore was a person whom it would be healthy to let alone. So he and his escort took themselves off into the forest as unobtrusively as might be.

But with Laura, Carter took another tone. "Look here, my dear," he said, "you simply must run across to the Canaries till things have simmered down again here. I don't want to alarm you, but it's quite on the cards that infernal old Mormon of a King may take it into his woolly head to be dangerous. You've had one taste of his quality already."

"Two," said the girl, and shuddered, "and he's sent my father presents and messages since. But I can't go away from Smooth River, at any rate till my father comes back. He left me in charge, you see."

"Which I think very improper of him. I don't believe in girls being mixed up in business matters, at any rate in West Africa, and I am sure K. O'Neill would be frightfully down on it--what are you laughing at? Laura, tell me one-time what you are sniggering about in that ridiculous way. Oh, I see. You think I have never seen Mr. K. and am talking through my hat. Well, my dear, if you had read fifty times over every letter that K. has written to Malla-Nulla factory during the last eighteen months, you would know that man and his likes and his dislikes, and his ambitions, and his cranks just about as accurately as I do. Anyway, I repeat, he'd hate to have you here in charge."

"Just remember that I don't agree with you one bit, Mr. Carter."

"Very well, Miss Slade, you can jolly well do the other thing. But take charge here I shall, and go to the Islands you must. There's a B. and A. boat due to call at Monk River the day but one after to-morrow. I'll send for our surf boat, and we'll take you there in style. Won't you have a ripping time of it at Las Palmas and up in the Monte! I wonder what the new hotel's like up there. And I say, Laura, go down to that farm at the bottom of the Caldera, and I bet you a new hat it takes you half an hour longer than my record time to get up again as far as Atalaya--Hullo, what's the matter now?"

"You are making things rather hard for me. I'd go away from this hateful Coast if I could, but we simply can't afford it, and there you have the bare fact."

"But I thought----"

"Oh, yes, of course you did, that father was a sort of local millionaire. Well, he isn't. He did once have private means, but that I think was before I was born, and only the reputation of them remains now. He's made big commissions on the factory's trading, I know, but he's invested badly, and I think he's been robbed. Probably, too, I've been extravagant."

"Rubbish."

"Well, anyway, the money's gone, and the brutal truth is I haven't a sovereign in the world."

"Good Lord! You ought not to have been left here like that. It was beastly careless of Slade."

"He never thought of it. And if he had, he couldn't have done anything. His equipment of course came from about the factory, but as regards money, he went away without a pound in his pocket. There aren't shops that one can spend money in to be found up in the bush."

"It's disgustingly awkward," said Carter frowning. "Of course every penny that I have in the world would be as much yours as it ever had been mine, but the fact is, my dear, I've paid it all away as it came. You see, in a way I was a sort of bad egg before I got a billet out here on the Coast, where, I suppose, if you come to look at it, there are small opportunities of roystering. Besides, with Mr. Smith always before one as an example of what not to be, it doesn't take very much resolution to keep straight. Anyway, in ancient days I ran up all the debts I could get tick for, and I landed in the poor old Pater for a lot more than a younger son's share. Well, what with selling curios through that old blackguard Balgarnie on the _M'poso_ (who I know robs me of half the proceeds), and commission on our turnover at Malla-Nulla, which has increased a lot since I've been there (till of course this row cropped up), and my small bit of regular screw, altogether I've made a very decent income, and I've taken a bit of pride in paying off the old debts with ten per cent. of interest added. I knew that extra ten per cent. would tickle some of them frightfully. It was just that chunk of interest that cleaned me out down to the bone, and I chucked it in because I thought one could not possibly want hard cash down on the Coast here. What idiots men are to let themselves run short of money! However, I shall have another quarter's screw due in a couple of months' time and in the meanwhile you must go to the Islands on tick."

"You're a dear good boy, but it can't be done. I shall stay on here and make the best of things."

"You will do nothing of the kind, young woman. You will travel on a Madeira chair in a palatial surf boat as far as Monk River as we just now arranged, and then I shall walk on board the B. and A. boat with you, and explain to the purser who you are, and everything will be as right as ninepence."

She looked at him with full eyes. "You make things difficult for me."

"Not a bit of it. I'm the man that's going to shoulder the difficulties."

"Oh, you didn't know it. But if you asked a favor for my father's daughter from the purser of the _Secondee_--she's the boat that's due--you would get an unkind answer. We're in debt all round, and I'm afraid he didn't behave very well to either the purser or the captain of the _Secondee_. Now, please do not press me any more. I stay here at Smooth River factory."

George Carter hit the table with his fist. "Then I stay, too. The da Silvas will put me up, and if they object, I'll turn them out into the bush and live in their house alone. Malla-Nulla must look after itself."

"What will Mr. K. say to that?"

"He will approve. K.'s a tough nut in business matters, but he's a man all through."

"Is he?" said the girl with a queer smile. "I don't agree with you."'

"One may not at the moment like the way he hustles one along in his letters," said Carter stoutly, "but he's a man all through, and if he was to get to know how things are fixed here, and to hear I'd stuck to my own job at Malla-Nulla and left you in the lurch at Smooth River, he'd fire me one-time, even if he had to get a steamer specially stopped to land his mail. No, K. O'Neill would have no use for brutes of that description in his employ. Now, if you'll be so very nice, my dear, as to pick up that swizzle-stick and make me a good grippy cocktail, when I've had that I'll go out and do what I can to discourage the Okky men if they see fit to pay a call."

Now, his Majesty the King of Okky once boasted to a West African official that he could put 20,000 spearmen into the field, but there is no doubt that this was an over-estimate. Moreover many of the Okky troops carried flintlock guns and matchets in place of the spear, and others again were bowmen, and still others wielded the Dahomey axe. But his Majesty was a parvenu king who had fought his way to the throne, and he saw to it that there was no inefficiency in his War Office. He made the conditions of service sufficiently pleasant to tempt in the fighting Moslemin from the Haûsa country, and these fine soldiers of fortune gave the needful stiffening to his own pagan levies.

Then, also, the King of Okky made full use of the great cult of Ju-ju. The average West African king is completely under the thumb of the ju-ju men, and if he is not actually their nominee and puppet, he knows that if he runs at all counter to their wishes and policy, he will die some frantic death devised by the cleverest poisoners on earth. But King Kallee the First was not only King of Okky but he was also Head Ju-ju man of that mysterious state, or as it is sometimes written, Head Witch-doctor. He could, when he chose, hale a subject from his dwelling and pin him to the Okky City crucifixion tree for no further reason than his kingly will. He could also cause a piece of fluttering rag, or a bunch of hen's feathers to be tied above a subject's lintel, and that subject and all his household would not dare to pass the charm; nor would anyone else dare to have communion with them; so that in the end they would die of hunger and thirst and become a pestilence to the community among whom they had lived; and no one thought of raising the breath of objection. The King had put ju-ju on one of his own subjects, and that was all.

Moreover the King, having set eyes on Laura Slade, wished to instal her in a wing of the great mud palace of Okky as his wife. So far, throughout life, when he had created a wish, fulfilment followed as a matter of course, be the means what they might. In his demands for Laura, Kallee was at times amazed at his own moderation. He had approached Slade (who to him was the girl's proprietor) just as one native gentleman might approach another, and inquired her price. Slade, who could not give a decisive answer even to such a preposterous matter as this, temporized after his usual custom. The King naturally saw in this a scheme to enhance the girl's price and displayed royal munificence. He would pay Slade a thousand puncheons of palm oil and a thousand bags of rubber, and two thousand bags of kernels; and when Slade waved this aside and spoke of his daughter's reluctance for matrimony, Kallee spoke of the splendor in which his chief queen would live. Slaves in all abundance, cloth as fine as silk, ornaments of gold, and an American alarm clock should be hers; her food should be coos-cousoo of the finest, her drink should be Heidsieck of a vintage year exclusively. All the affairs of State should be exhibited for her approval, and even his two brass cannon should be housed in her apartments. The King showed himself to be the royal lover in lavish perfection, and Slade could not bring himself to cut short the offer and tell him that the whole thing was impossible. He temporized, and congratulated himself each time the matter came up on having got rid of the King without rupture of their friendly relations.

However, the royal patience, which had never been strung out to such a length before, reached its breaking strain that day at Malla-Nulla under circumstances already recorded, and what the King could not obtain by this new diplomacy he very naturally made up his mind to get hold of by methods which were more native to his experience.

Being moreover a strategist with a good deal of sound elementary skill, he did not give the enemy time to bring in reinforcements after the first news of danger. Kwaka's embassy was a reconnoitring expedition as much as anything, and the detail that the brazen Kwaka should be scared out of his seven senses by the man whose red head the King had already ordered for a palace ornament, was a small thing which stood beyond his calculation. A force of 500 picked men lay in bivouac a bare five miles inland from the factory; the ju-ju signs on the bush roads protected these from all espionage; and when night fell, a ju-ju man who was the King's special envoy performed a ceremony which he said, and which they understood, granted the soldiers a special dispensation against those ghosts which all West African natives know haunt the darkness. So they advanced to the attack through the gloom of the steaming forest shades, those of them who were pagans with high spirit and fine hopes of loot, and those of them who were Moslemin filled with a vague fear which they gleaned from Kwaka's hints.

Now Carter did not fall into the usual Englishman's trick of despising his enemy. Indeed he had that figure of 20,000 fighting men firmly lodged in his head, and short of the opportune arrival of a British gunboat, expected sooner or later a furious fight. But he reckoned that Kwaka would have to go back to Okky City with his report, and afterwards return from thence with an attacking force; and he counted also on the African's fear of ghosts, and looked with confidence to no disturbance during the hours of darkness.

So although he worked the sweating factory hands at high pressure in piling up puncheons and cases, and bales of cloth, and sacks of salt into a substantial breastwork, he went to bed himself that night and felt, as he tucked in the edge of the mosquito bar, that few white men on the Coast had ever earned better a spell of sleep.

It was at 2 A.M. when the Okky yell and the crash of a volley of pot-leg woke him, and he leaped up and through the gauze in one jump. He ran out onto the veranda, and met there Laura Slade. She was dressed, and had in her hand the cheap Skipton revolver which he had given her, and towards the purchase of which his father had once contributed a hard-to-spare ten shillings out of the whole half guinea that it cost. Moonlight poured down upon them pure and silvery from a clear night overhead, but all the land below up to the level of the veranda was filled with a mist that was white and thick as cotton wool. In this fog invisible black men screamed and yelled and cursed, and occasionally there came to them the red glare, and the roar, and the raw black-powder-smoke smell of the flintlocks.

"The beggars will rush those barricades," said Carter, "if I don't look out. You stay here, Laura, and put that pistol down. It's a beastly dangerous toy."

"I may want it for myself."

"Don't be melodramatic. Now run into the mess-room, there's a good girl, and get down those two Winchesters, and load up the magazines. I'm going down to help the boys."

But even as he spoke there came a sudden hard puff of the land breeze that made the mist swirl and twist up into ghostly life, and left canals and pools of clearness. He darted inside, snatched up one of the rifles, and crammed it full of cartridges. "I wish I'd a scatter-gun," he said. "I used to be a nailer at rabbits and the occasional grouse at home. However, it won't do to miss here, although the tool is new." He threw up the weapon to his shoulder, and shot as a game shot shoots, with head erect and both eyes staring wide at a leather charm-case on the broad black chest which he picked as his object. He did not know how to squint along the barrel. Then he pressed home the trigger, and had the thrill of knowing that he had shot his first man.... He warmed to the work after that, and fired on and on with deadly speed and accuracy, till the heated barrels of the repeaters burned Laura Slade's hands as she charged the magazines beneath them. From somewhere in the lower part of the factory came White-Man's-Trouble, and when in answer to the fusillade, showers of pot-leg began to rustle over the veranda and scream through the roof, that valiant person presently dragged out bedding to form a breastwork. But although Carter kicked him till his foot ached the Krooboy would not show his own head over it sufficiently to use a gun for the mutual defence. He stuck to it stolidly that he was a "plenty-too-much bad shot," and Carter was too much occupied in keeping up his own fire to spare time for further coercion. But as he changed rifles with Laura, he said every poisonous thing to White-Man's-Trouble that his mind could invent, and that African listened, but made neither answer nor reply.

The fight was going badly against the factory force. The Okky men's original surprise had been very complete, and they had rushed the outer line of the defences all round. The inner line consisted merely of the buildings; and the factory boys had bolted for these, and had joined the mulatto clerks and the Portuguese who were there already. The whole defence, of course, was badly managed; but then it must be remembered that it was devised by traders, not by soldiers. If it had not been for Carter's education on the moors and warrens of Upper Wharfedale, and his consequent deadliness with a rifle against rushes at close quarters, the factory would have been put to the storm within five minutes of the first attack.

Besides, with a few exceptions, the factory boys were Kroos; and these, though they are magnificent workers and about as amphibious as seals, are emphatically not fighting men. They battled manfully enough after the shock of the first surprise, and because no path of escape offered itself; and whilst there were trade guns to fire, they derived a fine encouragement from the noise of the black trade-powder explosions, and the acrid smell of smoke. But few of them made any attempt to reload their flintlocks a second time, and for cold matchet work at close quarters they had little appetite. So by ones, and twos, and tens, they began slipping off into the bush (to be hunted down piecemeal by the savage enemy later on) and soon only the clerks and the two fever-shaken Portuguese were left alive in the lower buildings.

It was at this point a new engine was added to the attack. Dawn had just leaped up yellow and sickly over the sea, when a crash rang out that jarred the air and every building about the place.

"Hear that?" croaked Carter. "That's a cannon, and a brass one as you can tell by the ring. It's probably one of those old brass guns that the Portuguese used to cast for the natives two hundred years ago. One of my curiosity dealers promised me fifty golden sovereigns for a genuine specimen. If I don't spot that gun and pick off the men who are serving it, they'll jug us for a certainty. But they've got the blessed thing so jolly well hidden among the bush! Well, I'm going to ease up on my own shooting and watch for the next flash. Get me a drink, you plucky darling, will you, or else my throat will crack in two. Bring a chattie of water; that's what I want. The heat of this night has been about the worst I have known on the Coast."

"It is too hot to last," said the girl. "I'm afraid even the water in the chattie will be as warm as tea."

She went into the mess-room, and presently came back on hands and knees to keep below the showers of pot-leg which were persistently whistling overhead, and gave him the wet porous bottle, and crouched beside him under the breastwork as he drank.

"Well, my sweetheart," said Carter, "if it isn't unlucky to drink one's best girl's health in water, here's your toast! You're the finest plucked lassie in all the wide and wondrous earth, and now I come to think of it, I don't believe I ever proposed to you."

"No, you never did. I don't see why you should."

"Stick your head lower down. That thing that said 'whisp-whisp!' was a rifle-bullet. They've got a blooming marksman down there, and I can't have you picked off. And don't talk rubbish. You know you're jolly going to marry me as soon as ever we can afford it, if ever we get out of this, which isn't likely." He clapped an arm snugly round her, and _w-o-s-h_ came a load of pot-leg into the other side of the bedding which protected them. "Got any silly objections to make to that?"

"Have you thought over what it means, George? You know I'm not white."

"Bosh! Anyway you're white enough for me. Let go the chattie. And as I said before, Here's luck. Ugh! African river water, half mud, half essence of nigger from higher up. Moreover, as you remarked, hot as tea. Bang! there goes that infernal cannon again, and I've been gossiping with you--proposing, I mean--and haven't seen the flash. Plunked a shot into one of the palm oil puncheons in the store below, by the sound of it. Hullo, here comes the wind. Now, somebody will have his hair combed."

As though the discharge of the ancient brass gun had been a signal, a tornado opened upon them without warning, and almost in its full strength in the first blast.

One minute there was a stagnant calm, with air so hot and stale that it hardly seemed to refresh one to breathe it. The next wind travelling often at a hundred miles an hour bellowed and roared at them in tearing spasms of fury. The factory building reeled and groaned at its impact. Sticks, boards, corrugated roofing and empty barrels solved the problem of aerial flight. The close-grown trees of the forest that hemmed the factory in on the landward side were flattened earthwards as though by the pressure of some unseen giant hand; yes, flattened down, and down, till one thought that any human beings that were beneath them must inevitably be crushed out of all living shape into the foul, soft swampy ground beneath. And in cold truth some of the Okky men who cowered there during the enforced lull of the attack did so die.

The firing had ceased automatically on both sides, and a bombardment of sticks, leaves, sand and stones pelted them all unmercifully. It was impossible to face the wind; indeed, so violent was the torrent of air, that the mere act of taking breath became a matter of the nicest art.

The girl lay crouched under the huddle of bedding, buffetted into semi-unconsciousness, with Carter's arm holding her tight down to the floor boards of the veranda. He put his lips to her ear and bawled a message. She shook her head. Through the insane yell of the wind she could not hear a word. He laughed and kissed her, and then, taking away his protecting arm, worked his perilous way like some clinging, creeping thing into the inside of the dwelling.

Even this was filled with the wind. A door, smashed from its hinges, clattered noisily about in one corner, as though it had been some uncouth mechanical toy propelled by clumsy clockwork. Everything movable hopped on the floor, or danced from the walls. And of course to this disorder was added all the dishevelment which had been caused by the volleys of jagged cast iron fired through the flimsy walls by the Okky men's flintlocks. But Carter knew what he wanted, and sought for it with a single mind.

Presently from amongst the _débris_ he emerged with a four-gallon drum; and then he worked his way to a cupboard where Slade kept his store of cigarettes. Luckily it was full. Slade had boarded a steamer lately where his credit in the forecastle shop was still untarnished, and his plausible tongue had procured him a whole two-dozen case of half-hundred tins on some ingenious deferred-payment scheme of his own. There were twenty-two of the green tins left, and Carter got them all out, opened them, and recklessly emptied their contents onto the floor. With infinite pains, and sheltering the liquid from the blast under his coat, he decanted the contents of the big drum into the tins till all were full. Then he re-lidded them, and jabbed a hole with his penknife in each lid.

He rebuilt them into their own wooden case as he primed them, and when this was full, dragged it out through the doorway into the casemate of mattresses. Laura and White-Man's-Trouble still crouched there helplessly, and the tornado still yelled and roared and boomed. It was carrying water with it now, bitter salt from the sea, and whipping the face like hail where it impinged.

Carter was breathless and panting by the time he had managed once more to drag himself under the shelter of the bedding; but he was keenly alive to the needs of the immediate future. Already he noted a diminution in the tornado's fury; the hustling cloud of sticks, and leaves, and branches, which it carried along was growing less thick, and although this was by far the hardest hurricane he had ever seen, he knew from previous acquaintance with the breed that it might well drop to perfect calm as suddenly as it had arisen.

As a point of fact it deceived him. The wind lulled, and the forest trees swung upwards in unison as though they had been performing a trick. The air cleared, and Carter raised his head to try and spot the part of the bush where the brass gun was masked. A black man sprang from the undergrowth, lifted a gun, fired, and missed. Carter threw up the Winchester for a snapshot.

"Got him--Laura, for the Lord's sake keep down in shelter, or they'll pick you off to a certainty. Trouble, you hound, roll up those pillows and blankets underneath you into a hard wad, and stuff them into that gap at the corner there----"

"Isn't there a splendid chill after that awful heat?" the girl said. "Wrap up, George, or you'll have fever. Here's your coat."

"Look out," Carter shouted. "Hold on all with those blankets. Here comes more tornado."

Once more the wind slammed down upon them with insane fury, and once more all loose inanimate things rose into vigorous flight. The forest trees cowered down into the swamps from which they grew. Solid rods of rain split against the factory buildings, and sent deluges of water squirting through the bamboo walls as though the matchwood backing had not been there. The roar was like the continuous passing of a hundred heavy trains over a hundred iron bridges all side by side.

Gone altogether now was the stagnant heat. The air was scoured clean, and it was forced into the lungs at such high pressure that it exhilarated one like some deliciously choice vintage of champagne.

"I'm hanged if I let those beggars kill us," Carter bawled out during one of the lulls. "In this splendid air life's too gorgeous." And then bump came the wind upon them again.

But the tornado had blown out the heart of its strength. In five more minutes the wind had dropped, the rain ceased, the air cleared, the sun glared out overhead and began to heat the tropical day, and white steam oozed up from all the face of creation.

This time Carter's rifle represented the whole orchestra of death for the defence. The factory Krooboys' flintlocks spoke no more; the ill-aimed Winchesters of the snuff-and-butter colored da Silva and his wife were silent. The Portuguese and the factory clerks, and the factory porters had cannily crawled away into the bush. They knew nothing of what was ahead of them in those steamy shades. One certainty alone fluttered big in their minds, and that was that they were leaving massacre behind.