Читать книгу The People of the River - Edgar Wallace - Страница 9

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MR. COMMISSIONER SANDERS came down to the beach to meet her and he was in no amiable frame of mind.

She saw a man of medium height, dressed in spotless white, a big white helmet shading a face tanned to the colour of teak. His face was thin and clean-shaven, his eyes unwavering and questioning, his every movement conveying the impression of alert vitality.

"I suppose I ought to be glad to see you," he said, shaking his head reprovingly. "You're the first white woman I've seen for many rains —but you're a responsibility."

She laughed, and gave him a cool, soft hand to shake. "You don't like missionaries, do you?" she smiled.

"I don't," said Sanders; "but I've had all sorts of orders to see that you're made comfortable; and really there is a lot of work on the river—medical work amongst the women. You're the doctor, I suppose?"

She shook her head.

"I'm the nurse," she said; "the doctor was taken ill before I sailed."

"Humph!" said Sanders.

He had had a hut prepared for her, and two native women trained to the ways of white folk to wait upon her. He gave her dinner that night at his bungalow, and invited the Houssa captain to share the meal. It was the nearest approach to a chaperon he could find.

"I've had a hut built for you," he said; "and the stores and furniture which came for you have been sent up. There are three or four missionaries in the country. You will find Father O'Leary at Cosinkusu—that's about a hundred miles from you. He's a decent sort of chap. There's a man named Boyton—he's a Baptist, or something, and is always on the rampage against the father for proselytising his flock. Boyton lives about one hundred and fifty miles from you. They're the principal missionaries."

He gave her a brief history of the district in which she was to live; indeed, he told her much more than he ever intended telling, but those grey eyes were very compelling and those lips were so ready to smile.

She stayed two days at headquarters and on the third morning her belongings were packed on the Zaire.

Before this she met Bosambo of Monrovia, specially summoned.

"This man is chief of the tribe which lies nearest to your station," said Sanders; "though you are practically in the Isisi country. I have sent for him to—to—?"

"Tell him to look after me," she smiled, and Sanders smiled responsively.

"Something like that. As a matter of fact, I wanted you to see him here so that he might know that you go as my guest and my friend."

He stammered a little, for Sanders was not used to saying pretty things.

When he had seen her on board he sent for Bosambo.

"Bosambo," he said, in the vernacular, "this lady is of my race, and she will be alone amongst my people, who are wicked and cunning, seeking to deceive her, for she is a God-woman, though she is also a doctor. Now to you I say guard her till your last breath of life, and be in my place, as me, in all matters that touch her."

Bosambo stretched out his hands, palm upwards.

"Master," he said earnestly, "if I swore by the Blessed Virgin whom I worshipped in Liberia, behold I do not know who I swear by, for I have forgotten the holy things that the fathers taught me. But by my head and spirit, and by my life-ghost, I will do as you say."

He turned and walked majestically to the boat. Half-way down the beach he turned about and came back to Sanders.

"Lord, when I have been faithful to your honour's satisfaction, will you buy for me at Sierra Leone a piece of gold cloth, such as a chief might wear?"

"Go, you bargaining child!" said Sanders, without irritation.

He watched the little steamer until it swept round a bend of the river out of sight, and then walked slowly to the bungalow, with—it must be confessed—a sigh.

In Sierra Leone, about this time, Burney Mackiney was engaged with his father.

The elder Mackiney was not pleasant to look upon, being grossly stout, puckered and yellow of face, and affected with stertorous breathing.

"It's worth trying," he said, after there had been long silence; "the country's full of rubber, and there's no law preventing the importation of liquor—except the law which gives the commissioner the right to make his own laws. How would you get in?"

"Through the French territory," said his son; "it's dead easy."

There was another long pause.

"But why do you want to go?" asked the elder. "It's not like you to go to a lot of trouble."

"I want to see the country," said the other carelessly. He wanted something more than that. For days he had been hatching his black plot —the Arabs had done such things, and it would not be difficult. Clear of civilisation, he would become an Arab—he spoke coast Arabic perfectly.

He could buy his way through the tribes; a swift dash across the French frontier, he could reach the Isisi River—stay long enough to establish the fact that it was an Arab trader who was the guilty man. She would have to marry him then.

This, in brief, was his plan.

He chose his caravan carefully, and a month later left Sierra Leone in an "S. and M." steamer for an unknown destination.

Exactly three months after he had said good-bye to the missionary, Mr. Commissioner Sanders was serenely and leisurely making his way along a small river, which leads to a distant section of the Lesser Isisi, when he met a common man, named I'fambi M'Waka—or M'Wafamba as he was called.

Sanders, at the time, was using a little launch, for the Zaire was in "dock"—in other words, she was beached.

The Commissioner was proceeding up stream, M'Wafamba was floating down in his battered iron-wood canoe and looking over the side, Sanders regarded the man with idle curiosity.

As they came abreast, M'Wafamba sat upright and turned his face.

"Ho, Sandi!" he called boisterously.

"Ho, man!" called Sanders. "Take your canoe nearer the shore, for my swift boat will make the waters dance and you may suffer."

For answer came a peal of hoarse laughter.

"Ho, Sandi!" bawled M'Wafamba; "white man, pig eater, white monkey!"

Sanders' hand tightened on the steering wheel, and he sent the launch round in a circle until he came up with the canoe.

One Houssa caught the canoe with a boat hook, another reached over and gripped the insolent M'Wafamba by the arm.

A little dazed, and resisting awkwardly, he was pulled into the launch.

"Either one of two things you are," said Sanders; "mad with sickness mango or a great rascal."

"You are a liar, and an eater of liars," said the reckless M'Wafamba; and when Sanders put out his hand to feel the neck of the man for tell-tale swellings, M'Wafamba tried to bite it.

Sanders drew back sharply, not from fear of the bite, but for another reason.

Whilst two of his men sat on the struggling prisoner's chest, he steered the boat for the bank.

"Get him ashore," said the commissioner; and the luckless captive was dragged to land without ceremony.

"Tie him to a tree and make ready for a flogging," said Sanders.

They strapped his hands above the trunk of a young gum tree and stripped his cloth from his shoulders, whilst Sanders walked up and down, his hands in his pockets, his head sunk on his breast, for of a sudden on that sunlit day there had risen a cloud which blotted out all brightness from his official life.

When his men had finished their work Sanders approached the prisoner, a little frightened now, though somewhat rambling of speech.

"How do they call you, my man?" asked the commissioner.

"I'fambi M'Waka," whimpered the man by the tree, "commonly M'Wafamba —of the village of the Pool of Devils."

"M'Wafamba," said Sanders, "being of the Isisi people, you know something of me and my way."

"Lord, I have seen you, and also your way," said the man.

"And if I say 'death' what do I mean?"

"Lord, you mean death, as all men on the river know," said M'Wafamba.

Sanders nodded.

"Now, I am going to flog you till you die," he Said grimly, "if you do not tell me where you found drink in my land—for you are drunk with a certain evil poison, which is called ginni, and it is forbidden by law that ginni shall be bought or sold in this territory."

Then the man rolled his head drunkenly.

"Strike, pig eater," he said heroically, "for I have sworn an oath that I will tell no man."

"So be it," said Sanders; "it is your oath against my whipping."

Abiboo, the sergeant of the Houssa, tall and strong of arm, took a firm grip of his hide-whip, stepped a little to one side and sent it whistling round his head, then—

"Flack!"

M'Wafamba woke the forest with a yell.

"Enough!" he screamed. "I speak!"

They loosed him.

"Lord," he wept, "it was an Arabi man, who came across the French border; this he gave me for certain rubber I collected, saying it would put the spirit of white men into my heart and make me equal in courage to the bravest. And so it did, lord; but now it has gone out of me, and my heart is like water."

"What manner of Arabi was this?" asked Sanders.

"Lord, he was big and strong, and had a fat face like a pig and he wore a ring."

"When did you see him?"

"Two days' journey from here, lord; but he has gone, for he has great matters on hand—so a man, who is my cousin, told me—for he goes to the Ochori country to lift the white woman, who gives us certain beastly waters to drink when we are sick."

The trees seemed of a sudden to spin and the ground to heave up under the Commissioner's feet. He staggered a little, and Abiboo, suspecting fever, leapt to his side and put his strong arm on his shoulders. Only for a second he stood thus, white as death; then—

"Into the boat!" he said.

There was wood enough on board for six hours' steaming—the mission station was twelve hours at the least.

He swept down the little river swiftly and turned to breast the strong currents of the Isisi. Six hours, almost to the minute, the wood lasted. It brought him to a fishing village, where a store of government wood awaited him.

But the "Arabi" had two days' start.

Mackiney had bribed and fought his way through the Mishadombi tribe (those "people-who-are-not-all-alike," about which I must tell you), which serve as a buffer State between French and British territory; he had corrupted the Isisi, and now, with a guide—the cousin of that same M'Wafamba—was moving rapidly on the mission station.

It had been built at the junction of two rivers, in the very spot where, a year before, Sanders had established himself as "the Silent One."

Mackiney had with him fifty men, mainly of the Kroo coast.

His plan was to take to one of the smaller streams that feed the Isisi. It was navigable for eighty miles and would bring him to within a month's march of the regular caravan route to Lago—by then he hoped the girl would be compliant.

His party reached within striking distance of his objective late in the afternoon.

The mission house was half a mile from the village, and he sent out spies who brought him word that beyond two native women and a couple of men there was no opposition to be feared.

He sat apart from his men as they cooked their evening meal.

In his long white burnous, his head enveloped in a filleted hood, he was an Arab to the life.

When night came his headman approached him. "Master," he asked, "what of this Kaffir?"

He spoke of the guide.

"Him you will kill," said Mackiney in Arabic; "for I do not know how much he guesses."

"He guesses too much," said the headman; "for he says that you are no Arab, but a white man."

"You must lose no time," said Mackiney shortly.

He sat waiting by the fire they had kindled for him. Soon he heard a little scuffle and turning his head saw a knot of swaying men and a muffled bellowing like that of a man with a cloth upon his face.

The group went staggering into the forest, disappearing in the darkness of the night.

By and by they came back laughing amongst themselves. The cousin of M'Wafamba, who went with them, did not come back.

"It is time," said his headman. "In two hours the moon will be here."

Very quickly the fires were extinguished and the cooking-pots stacked in the forepart of the big canoe, and in silence, with paddles striking evenly, they crossed the river.

The canoe was beached two hundred yards from the mission house, near a clump of bush. From here to the path was a few steps.

In single file, headed by the white-robed Arab, the party made its stealthy way along the twisting path. On either side the trees rose steeply, and save for the call of night birds there was no sound.

The forest ended abruptly. Ahead of them was a little clearing and in the centre the dark bulk of the mission hut.

"Now may Allah further our enterprise," breathed Mackiney, and took a step forward.

Out of the ground, almost at his feet, rose a dark figure.

"Who walks in the night?" asked a voice.

"Damn you!" grunted Mackiney in English.

The figure moved ever so slightly.

"Master," he said, "that is a white man's word, yet you have the dress of an Arabi."

Mackiney recovered himself.

"Man, whoever you are, stand on one side, for I have business with the God-woman."

"I also," was the calm reply, "for our Lord Sandi put me here; and I am as he; here have I stood every night save one."

Mackiney had a revolver in his hand, but he dare not fire for fear of alarming the occupants of the hut.

"Let me go on," he said. He knew, rather than saw, the long spear that was levelled at his breast in the darkness. "Let me be, and I will give you many bags of salt and rods more numerous than the trees of the forest."

He heard a little chuckle in the darkness.

"You give too much for too little," said the voice. "Oh, M'laka!"

Mackiney heard the pattering of feet; he was trapped, for somewhere ahead of him armed men were holding the path.

He raised his revolver and fired twice at the figure.

A spear whizzed past him, and he leapt forward and grappled with the man in his path.

He was strong as a young lion, but the man whose hand caught his throat was no weakling. For an instant they swayed, then fell, rolling over and over in the path.

Mackiney reached his hand for another revolver. It closed round the butt, when he felt a shock—something hit him smoothly in the left side—something that sent a thrill of pain through every nerve in his body.

"Oh, dear!" said Mackiney in English.

He never spoke again.

"Arabi, or white man, I do not know," said Bosambo of Monrovia; "and there is none to tell us, because my people were quick to kill, and only one of his followers is left alive and he knows nothing."

"What have you done with this Arabi?" asked Sanders.

They held their palaver in the mission house in the first hours of the dawn and the girl, pale and troubled, sat at the table looking from one man to the other, for she knew little of the language.

"Lord," said Bosambo, "him I buried according to my desire that no man should know of this raid, lest it put evil thoughts in their heads."

"You did wisely," said Sanders.

He went back to headquarters a little puzzled, for he knew none of the facts of the case.

And when, months after, urgent inquiries came to him respecting the whereabouts of one Burney Mackiney, he replied in all truth that he could give no information.