Part 11

Hatteras took up his tale again, and it seemed to Walker that the man breathed the very miasma of the swamp and infected the room with it. He spoke of leopard societies, murder clubs, human sacrifices. He had witnessed them at the beginning, he had taken his share in them at the last. He told the whole story without shame, with indeed a glowing enjoyment. He spared Walker no details. He related them in their loathsome completeness until Walker felt stunned and sick. “Stop,” he said again, “stop! That’s enough.”

Hatteras, however, continued. He appeared to have forgotten Walker’s presence. He told the story to himself, for his own amusement, as a child will, and here and there he laughed, and the mere sound of his laughter was inhuman. He only came to a stop when he saw Walker hold out to him a cocked and loaded revolver.

“Well?” he asked. “Well?”

Walker still offered him the revolver.

“There are cases, I think, which neither God’s law nor man’s law seems to have provided for. There’s your wife, you see, to be considered. If you don’t take it I shall shoot you myself now, here, and mark you I shall shoot you for the sake of a boy I loved at school in the old country.”

Hatteras took the revolver in silence, laid it on the table, fingered it for a little.

“My wife must never know,” he said.

“There’s the pistol. Outside’s the swamp. The swamp will tell no tales, nor shall I. Your wife need never know.”

Hatteras picked up the pistol and stood up.

“Good-bye, Jim,” he said, and half pushed out his hand. Walker shook his head, and Hatteras went out on the verandah and down the steps.

Walker heard him climb over the fence and then followed as far as the verandah. In the still night the rustle and swish of the undergrowth came quite clearly to his ears. The sound ceased, and a few minutes afterwards the muffled crack of a pistol-shot broke the silence like the tap of a hammer. The swamp, as Walker prophesied, told no tales. Mrs. Hatteras gave the one explanation of her husband’s disappearance that she knew, and returned broken-hearted to England. There was some loud talk about the self-sacrificing energy which makes the English a dominant race, and there you might think is the end of the story.

But some years later Walker went trudging up the Ogowe River in Congo Français. He travelled as far as Woermann’s factory in Njob Island, and, having transacted his business there, pushed up stream in the hope of opening the upper reaches for trade purposes. He travelled for a hundred and fifty miles in a little sternwheel steamer. At that point he stretched an awning over a whale-boat, embarked himself, his banjo and eight blacks from the steamer, and rowed for another fifty miles. There he ran the boat’s nose into a clay cliff close to a Fan village, and went ashore to negotiate with the chief.

There was a slip of forest between the village and the river banks, and while Walker was still dodging the palm creepers which tapestried it he heard a noise of lamentation. The noise came from the village, and was general enough to assure him that a chief was dead. It rose in a chorus of discordant howls, low in note and very long drawn out—wordless, something like the howls of an animal in pain, and yet human by reason of their infinite melancholy.

Walker pushed forward, came out upon a hillock fronting the palisade which closed the entrance to the single street of huts, and passed down into the village. It seemed as though he had been expected. For from every hut the Fans rushed out towards him, the men dressed in their filthiest rags, the women with their faces chalked and their heads shaved. They stopped, however, on seeing a white man, and Walker knew enough of their tongue to ascertain that they looked for the coming of the witch-doctor. The chief, it appeared, had died a natural death, and since the event is of sufficiently rare occurrence in the Fan country, it had promptly been attributed to witchcraft, and the witch-doctor had been sent for to discover the criminal. The village was consequently in a lively state of apprehension, for the end of those who bewitch chiefs to death is not easy. The Fans, however, politely invited Walker to inspect the corpse. It lay in a dark hut, packed with the corpse’s relations, who were shouting to it at the top of their voices on the off-chance that its spirit might think better of its conduct and return to the body. They explained to Walker that they had tried all the usual varieties of persuasion. They had put red pepper into the chief’s eyes while he was dying; they had propped open his mouth with a stick; they had burned fibres of the oil-nut under his nose. In fact they had made his death as uncomfortable as possible, but none the less he had died.

The witch-doctor arrived on the heels of the explanation, and Walker, since he was powerless to interfere, thought it wise to retire for a time. He went back to the hillock on the edge of the trees. Thence he looked across and over the palisade, and had the whole length of the street within his view.

The witch-doctor entered in from the opposite end to the beating of many drums. The first thing Walker noticed was that he wore a square-skirted eighteenth century coat and a tattered pair of brocaded knee breeches on his bare legs; the second was that he limped—ever so slightly. Still he limped, and with the right leg. Walker felt a strong desire to see the man’s face, and his heart thumped within him as he came nearer and nearer down the street. But his hair was so matted about his cheeks that Walker could not distinguish a feature. “If I was only near enough to see his eyes,” he thought. But he was not near enough, nor would it have been prudent for him to have gone nearer.

The witch-doctor commenced the proceedings by ringing a handbell in front of every hut. But that method of detection failed to work. The bell rang successfully at every door. Walker watched the man’s progress, watched his trailing limb, and began to discover familiarities in his manner: “Pure fancy,” he argued with himself. “If he had not limped I should have noticed nothing.”

Then the doctor took a wicker basket, covered with a rough wooden lid. The Fans gathered in front of him; he repeated their names one after the other, and at each name he lifted the lid. But that plan appeared to be no improvement, for the lid never stuck. It came off readily at each name. Walker, meanwhile, calculated the distance a man would have to cover who walked across country from Bonny River to the Ogowe, and he reflected with some relief that the chances were several thousand to one that any man who made the attempt, be he black or white, would be eaten on the way.

The witch-doctor turned back the big square cuffs of his sleeves as a conjurer will do, and again repeated the names. This time, however, at each name he rubbed the palms of his hands together. Walker was seized with a sudden longing to rush down into the village and examine the man’s right forearm for a bullet mark. The longing grew on him. The witch-doctor went steadily through the list. Walker rose to his feet and took a step or two down the hillock, when, of a sudden, at one particular name, the doctor’s hands flew apart and waved wildly about him. A single cry from a single voice went up out of the group of Fans. The group fell back and left one man standing alone. He made no defence, no resistance. Two men came forward and bound his hands and his feet and his body with tie-tie. Then they carried him within a hut.

“That’s sheer murder,” thought Walker. He could not rescue the victim, he knew. But he could get a nearer view of the witch-doctor. Already the man was packing up his paraphernalia. Walker stepped back among the trees, and running with all his speed, made the circuit of the village. He reached the further end of the street just as the witch-doctor walked out into the open.

Walker ran forward a yard or so until he, too, stood plain to see on the level ground. The witch-doctor did see him and stopped. He stopped only for a moment and gazed earnestly in Walker’s direction. Then he went on again towards his own hut in the forest.

Walker made no attempt to follow him. “He has seen me,” he thought. “If he knows me he will come down to the river bank to-night.” Consequently, he made the black rowers camp a couple of hundred yards down stream. He himself remained alone in his canoe.

The night fell noiseless and black, and the enclosing forest made it yet blacker. A few stars burned in the strip of sky above his head. Those stars and the glimmering of the clay bank to which the boat was moored were the only light which Walker had. It was as dark as that night when Walker waited for Hatteras at the wicket gate.

He placed his gun and a pouch of cartridges on one side, an unlighted lantern on the other, and then he took up his banjo, and again he waited. He waited for a couple of hours, until a light crackle as of twigs snapping came to him out of the forest. Walker struck a chord on his banjo, and played a hymn tune. He played, “Abide with me,” thinking that some picture of a home, of a Sunday evening in England’s summer time, perhaps of a group of girls singing about a piano, might flash into the darkened mind of the man upon the bank, and draw him as with cords. The music went tinkling up and down the river, but no one spoke, no one moved upon the bank. So Walker changed the tune, and played a melody of the barrel organs and Piccadilly Circus. He had not played more than a dozen bars, before he heard a sob from the bank, and then the sound of something sliding down the clay. The next instant, a figure shone black against the clay. The boat lurched under the weight of a foot upon the gunwale, and a man plumped down in front of Walker.

“Well, what is it?” asked Walker, as he laid down his banjo and felt for a match in his pocket.

It seemed as though the words roused the man to a perception that he had made a mistake. He said as much hurriedly in trade-English, and sprang up as though he would leap from the boat. Walker caught hold of his ankle.

“No, you don’t,” said he; “you must have meant to visit me. This isn’t Henley,” and he jerked the man back into the bottom of the boat.

The man explained that he had paid a visit out of the purest friendliness.

“You’re the witch-doctor, I suppose,” said Walker.

The other replied that he was, and proceeded to state that he was willing to give information about much that made white men curious. He would explain why it was of singular advantage to possess a white man’s eyeball, and how very advisable it was to kill anyone you caught making Itung. The danger of passing near a cotton tree which had red earth at the roots provided a subject which no prudent man should disregard; and Tando, with his driver ants, was worth conciliating. The witch-doctor was prepared to explain to Walker how to conciliate Tando. Walker replied that it was very kind of the witch-doctor, but Tando did not really worry him. He was, in fact, very much more worried by an inability to understand how a native so high up the Ogowe River had learned to speak trade-English.

The witch-doctor waved the question aside, and remarked that Walker must have enemies. “Pussin bad too much,” he called them. “Pussin woh-woh. Berrah well! Ah send grand krau-krau and dem pussin die one time.”

Walker could not recollect for the moment any “pussin” whom he wished to die one time, whether from grand krau-krau or any other disease. “Wait a bit,” he continued, “there is one man—Dick Hatteras!” and he struck the match suddenly. The witch-doctor started forward as though to put it out.

Walker, however, had the door of the lantern open. He set the match to the wick of the candle, and closed the door fast. The witch-doctor drew back. Walker lifted the lantern and threw the light on his face. The witch-doctor buried his face in his hands, and supported his elbows on his knees. Immediately Walker darted forward a hand, seized the loose sleeve of the witch-doctor’s coat, and slipped it back along his arm to the elbow. It was the sleeve of the right arm, and there on the fleshy part of the forearm was the scar of a bullet.

“Yes,” said Walker. “By God, it is Dick Hatteras!”

“Well?” cried Hatteras, taking his hands from his face. “What the devil made you tum-tum ‘Tommy Atkins’ on the banjo? Damn you!”

“Dick, I saw you this afternoon.”

“I know, I know. Why on earth didn’t you kill me that night in your compound?”

“I mean to make up for that mistake to-night!”

Walker took his rifle on to his knee. Hatteras saw the movement, leaned forward quickly, snatched up the rifle, snatched up the cartridges, thrust a couple of cartridges into the breech, and handed the loaded rifle back to his old friend.

“That’s right,” he said. “I remember. ‘There are some cases neither God’s law nor man’s law has quite made provision for.’” And then he stopped, with his finger on his lip. “Listen!” he said.

From the depths of the forest there came faintly, very sweetly the sound of church-bells ringing—a peal of bells ringing at midnight in the heart of West Africa. Walker was startled. The sound seemed fairy work, so faint, so sweet was it.

“It’s no fancy, Jim,” said Hatteras, “I hear them every night, and at matins and vespers. There was a Jesuit monastery here two hundred years ago. The bells remain, and some of the clothes.” He touched his coat as he spoke. “The Fans still ring the bells from habit. Just think of it! Every morning, every evening, every midnight, I hear those bells. They talk to me of little churches perched on hillsides in the old country, of hawthorn lanes, and women—English women. English girls—thousands of miles away, going along them to church. God help me! Jim, have you got an English pipe?”

“Yes; an English briarwood and some bird’s-eye.”

Walker handed Hatteras his briarwood and his pouch of tobacco. Hatteras filled the pipe, lit it at the lantern, and sucked at it avidly for a moment. Then he gave a sigh and drew in the smoke more slowly and yet more slowly.

“My wife?” he asked at last, in a low voice.

“She is in England. She thinks you dead.”

Hatteras nodded.

“There’s a jar of Scotch whisky in the locker behind you,” said Walker.

Hatteras turned round, lifted out the jar and a couple of tin cups. He poured whisky into each and handed one to Walker.

“No, thanks,” said Walker. “I don’t think I will.”

Hatteras looked at his companion for an instant. Then he emptied deliberately both cups over the side of the boat. Next he took the pipe from his lips. The tobacco was not half consumed. He poised the pipe for a little in his hand. Then he blew into the bowl and watched the dull red glow kindle into sparks of flame as he blew. Very slowly he tapped the bowl against the thwart of the boat until the burning tobacco fell with a hiss into the water. He laid the pipe gently down and stood up.

“So long, old man,” he said, and sprang out on the clay. Walker turned the lantern until the light made a disc upon the bank.

“Good-bye, Jim,” said Hatteras, and he climbed up the bank until he stood in the light of the lantern. Twice Walker raised the rifle to his shoulder, twice he lowered it. Then he remembered that Hatteras and he had been at school together.

“Good-bye, Dicky,” he cried, and fired. Hatteras tumbled down to the boat-side. The blacks down river were roused by the shot. Walker shouted to them to stay where they were, and as soon as their camp was quiet he stepped ashore. He filled up the whisky jar with water, tied it to Hatteras’ feet, shook his hand, and pushed the body into the river. The next morning he started back to Fernan Vaz.

THE RANSOM

By CUTLIFFE HYNE

Methuen wriggled himself into a corner of the hut, rested his shoulders against the _adobe_ wall, and made himself as comfortable as the raw-hide thongs with which he was tied up would permit. “Well, Calvert,” said he, “I hope you quite realise what an extremely ugly hole we’re in?”

“Garcia will hang the pair of us before sunset,” I replied, “and that’s a certainty. My only wonder is we haven’t been strung up before this.”

“You think a rope and a tree’s a sure thing, do you? I wish I could comfort myself with that idea. I wouldn’t mind a simple gentlemanly dose of hanging. But there are more things in heaven and earth, Calvert——” He broke off and whistled drearily.

I moistened my dry, cracked lips, and asked him huskily what he meant.

“Torture, old man. That’s what we’re being saved for, I’m very much afraid. A Peruvian guerilla is never a gentle-minded animal at the best of times, and Garcia is noted as being the most vindictive brute to be found between the Andes and the Pacific. Then if you’ll kindly remember how you and I have harried him, and shot down his men, and cut off his supplies, and made his life a torment and a thing of tremors for the last four weeks, you’ll see he had got a big bill against us. If he’d hated us less, he’d have had us shot at sight when we were caught; as it is, I’m afraid he felt that a couple of bullets in hot blood wouldn’t pay off the score.”

“If he thinks the matter over calmly, he’ll not very well avoid seeing that if he wipes us out there’ll be reprisals to be looked for.”

“And a fat lot,” replied Methuen grimly, “he’ll care for the chance of those. If we are put out of the way, he knows quite well that there are no two other men in the Chilian Service who can keep him on the trot as we have done. No, sir. We can’t scare Garcia with that yarn. You think that because we’re alive still there’s hope. Well, I’ve sufficient faith in my theory for this: If anyone offered me a shot through the head now, I’d accept it, and risk the chance.”

“You take the gloomy view. Now the man’s face is not altogether cruel. There’s humour in it.”

“Then probably he’ll show his funniness when he takes it out of us,” Methuen retorted. “Remember that punishment in the ‘Mikado’? That had ‘something humorous’ in it. Boiling oil, if I don’t forget.”

Involuntarily I shuddered, and the raw-hide ropes cut deeper into my wrists and limbs. I had no great dread of being killed in the ordinary way, or I should not have entered the Chilian Army in the middle of a hot war; and I was prepared to risk the ordinary woundings of action in return for the excitements of the fight. But to be caught, and held a helpless prisoner, and be deliberately tortured to death by every cruelty this malignant fiend, Garcia, could devise, was a possibility I had not counted on before. In fact, as the Peruvians had repeatedly given out that they would offer no quarter to us English in the Chilian Service, we had all of us naturally resolved to die fighting rather than be taken. And, indeed, this desperate feeling paid very well, since on two separate occasions when Methuen and myself had been cornered with small bodies of men, and would have surrendered if we could have been guaranteed our lives, we went at them each time so furiously that on each occasion we broke through and escaped. But one thinks nothing of the chances of death and maiming at those times. There is a glow within one’s ribs which scares away all trace of fear.

“I suppose there’s no chance of rescue?” I said.

“None whatever,” said Methuen, with a little sigh. “Think it over, Calvert. We start out from the _hacienda_ with an escort of five men, sing out our adios, and ride away to enjoy a ten days’ leave in the mountains. The troops are left to recruit; for ten days they can drop us out of mind. Within twelve hours of our leaving them, Garcia cleverly ambushes us in a cañon where not three people pass in a year. The poor beggars who form our escort are all _gastados_.”

“Yes, but are you sure of that?” I interrupted. “I saw them all drop off their horses when we were fired upon, but that doesn’t prove they were dead. Some might have been merely wounded, and when the coast cleared, it is just possible they crawled back to our post with the news. Still, I own it’s a small chance.”

“And you may divest yourself of even that thin rag of hope. Whilst you were being slung senseless across a horse, I saw that man without the ears go round with a _machete_, and—well, when the brute had done, there was no doubt about the poor fellows being as dead as lumps of mud. Ah, and talk of the devil——”

The earless man swung into the hut.

“_Buenas_, Señores,” said he mockingly. “You will have the honour now of being tried, and I’m sure I hope you will be pleased with the result.”

“I suppose we shall find that out later,” said Methuen with a yawn; “but anyway, I don’t think much of your hospitality. A cup of wine now after that ugly ride we’ve had to-day would come in very handy, or even a nip of _aguardiente_ would be better than nothing.”

“I fancy it might be a waste of good liquor,” was the answer; “but you must ask Garcia. He will see to your needs.”

A guard of twelve ragged fellows, armed with carbine and _machete_, had followed the earless man into the hut, and two of them, whilst he talked, had removed the seizings from our knees and ankles. They helped us to our feet, and we walked with them into the dazzling sunshine outside.

“I’ll trouble some of you for my hat,” said Methuen, when the glare first blazed down on him; and then, as no one took any notice of the request, he lurched against the earless man with a sudden swerve, and knocked his sombrero on to the brown baked turf. “Well, I’ll have yours, you flea-ridden _ladron_,” said he; “it’s better than nothing at all. Pick up the foul thing, and shake it, and put it on my head.”

The guerilla bared his teeth like an animal, and drew a pistol. I thought he would have shot my comrade out of hand, and by his look I could see that Methuen expected it. Indeed, he had deliberately invited the man to that end. But, either because the nearness of Garcia and fear of his discipline stayed him, or through thought of a finer vengeance which was to come, the earless man contented himself by dealing a battery of kicks and oaths, and bidding our guards to ward us more carefully.

In this way, then, we walked along a path between two fields of vines, and passed down the straggling street of the village which the guerillas had occupied, and brought up in a little _plaza_ which faced the white-walled chapel. In the turret a bell was tolling dolefully with slow strokes, and as the sound came to me through the heated air, it did not require much imagination to frame it into an omen. In the centre of the _plaza_ was a vast magnolia tree, filled with scented wax-like flowers, and splashed with cones of coral-pink.

We drew up before the _piazza_ of the principal house. Seated under its shade in a split-cane rocker, Garcia awaited us, a small, meagre, dark man, with glittering teeth, and fingers lemon-coloured from cigarette juice.

He stared at us and spat; and the trial, such as it was, began.

I must confess that the proceedings astonished me. Animus there certainly was; the guerillas as a whole were disposed to give us short shrift; but their chief insisted on at least some parade of justice. The indictment was set forward against us: We had shot, hanged, and harried, and in fact used all the harshness of war. Had we been Chilians in the Chilian Service, this might have been pardonable; but we were aliens from across the sea; mere freebooters, fighting, not for a country, but each for his own hand; and as such we were beyond the pale of military courtesy. We had earned a punishment. Had we any word to speak why this should not be given?

Garcia looked towards us expectantly, and then set himself to roll a fresh cigarette.

I shrugged my shoulders. It seemed useless to say anything.