Читать книгу Again Sanders - Edgar Wallace - Страница 8
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ОглавлениеAt Houssa headquarters was a very irascible Chief Staff Officer, who hated Lieutenant Tibbetts with a hatred beyond understanding—unless you allowed for the fact that he drank too much and suffered from a complication of tropical diseases all of which were disturbing to a man's temper in a country where one hundred and two in the shade is considered fairly cool.
His name was Omes, and the words of Omes, written and spoken, were calculated to disturb even the serenity of a young man so perfectly balanced and so completely lost to a sense of inferiority as Bones.
They met once when Major Omes was on a tour of inspection.
"Very nice, very nice indeed!" he said after inspecting company accounts. "I suppose you are the officer responsible?"
"Yes, sir," said Bones, purring.
"It was not done by an il-lit-er-ate savage who had recently learnt the ru-di-ments of the English language?"
He spoke like that.
"No, sir," said Bones.
"You will pardon my error," said Major Omes sweetly, "but ex-am-ining these accounts, in-de-cipherable as they are, my mistake is nat-ural. Never in my life have I seen su-ch a horror!"
And so on. He wrote in the same strain—and wrote weekly.
Bones had passed a restless month in the pursuit of knowledge and the forgetfulness of certain unpleasantnesses. It was by no means a quiet pursuit. When Bones was intensely interested in a subject, he employed quite a lot of his waking or talking moments, the terms being synonymous, in an endeavour to work up his unfortunate friend to an interest of the same intensity.
It was not a correspondence course on which he was engaged; somebody had sent him a book on Transmigration. It must have been written originally for children, for he understood every argument.
The passing on usually began at breakfast, and Hamilton, who recognized the symptoms, would make a fine effort to head off the student to the contemplation of sordid and mundane things.
"Do you realize, dear old sir," began Bones, on this morning, "that the soul, bein', as it were, a jolly old transient, that is to say a thing that is always poppin' off here an' there—"
"Will you kindly pop off to the clothing store after breakfast and count the trousers—short—drill?" asked Hamilton. "And when you've finished popping there, will you pop over to the company office and check the medical history sheets of the detachment? Major Omes has written."
"Certainly, dear old Ham. But leave old Omes out of it, old boy—why make me sick, dear old emetic?" said Bones. "What I mean to say is, dear old sir, do you realize that your soul was once in a duck, old boy—or maybe a snake, old officer? Perfectly ghastly, isn't it? On the other hand, dear old Ham, how well you've got on! It's quite possible, Ham, that once you were just a jolly old cat! I might have been hoofin' you off the verandah for pinchin' the chop!"
"You were most certainly a laughing jackass," growled Hamilton, "or a parrot."
"Bird of Paradise, dear old soul," said Bones instantly. "It's rum, Ham, but I've often dreamt I was flyin' with feathers stickin' out of my jolly old nut.''
"That was when you were an angel, you silly goop," growled Hamilton.
"My point is—"
"Oh, DO shut up, Bones!" groaned Sanders.
Bones bowed.
"I wouldn't object," said Hamilton later, when he and Sanders were alone, "but as usual he is demoralizing the detachment. Abiboo, who is a strict Mussulman, got up in the air because Bones suggested he might have been once a guinea-pig."
But Mr. Tibbetts' obsession did not end with the suggestion that he had met his companions in other incarnations. His own reminiscences were a little trying.
"I had it this mornin', old boy," he said to Hamilton. "Just a flash, dear old officer; it all came back. Rome, dear old Nero, the Hippodrome where the poor old johnnies were being burnt to death—everything."
"Were you Nero or the Hippodrome?" asked Hamilton wearily. "I suppose you really mean the Coliseum?"
"One of those halls, Ham. There was Nero sittin' in a stage box all gold an' purple; there was me—"
"In the orchestra?" suggested his bored friend.
"No, Ham—in the pit, bein' chased by lions all over the beastly ring. I sort of felt his naughty old nose on my shoulder an' he was just goin' to grab me when I came to myself."
"Pity," said Hamilton "If you'd only waited a second I should be applying for a new subaltern."
Bones shrugged his shoulders and went back to his hut to finish a letter which he had begun and which was addressed to 'The New Incarnation: a Journal of Consciousness'.
The hobbies of Bones would have been fairly unimportant but for this illusion of his, that every new idea which struck him was something well worth imparting to others.
Then came the pigeon with Bosambo's warning in scrawled Arabic. Sanders read and was troubled. He had that uncanny instinct for first causes, and for an hour he pondered the dramatic reappearance of the Leopards and found at the end a satisfactory explanation.
He, sent for Bones, and to his astonishment Mr. Tibbetts came, holding a fluttering telegraph form in his hand, and on his face a most woebegone expression.
"What's the trouble?" asked Hamilton. "Has dear old Omes—"
"Popped off, old boy," said Bones dismally. "Gathered to his dear old papas. Fearfully bad luck."
"Omes?" asked Hamilton, raising his eyebrows incredulously.
"Jolly old angel," said the gloomy Bones, "practically speaking. I've never been so fearfully upset in all my life."
"Dead?" asked Hamilton.
"Almost, old boy. Collapsed—rushed him on the steamer. Terrible old wreck."
Major Omes had indeed all but gone the way of humanity. Following a heavy night at mess, and a hot morning, and a misguided attempt to reduce his obesity with a new and patent apparatus there almost occurred a vacancy in the Army List.
"Very bad luck," said Sanders, who in such moments as these was no sentimentalist. "But I want you to take twenty men and a machinegun into the Isisi country, arrest M'anin and bring him to headquarters. Arrest also Tigisaki and B'welo..." He named half a dozen names. "And if they oppose, shoot. The Leopard is putting his head up. This time bring back the whole skin."
Bones left in the Zaire, and for the time being forgot his studies. There was excuse for his forgetfulness; for ten days he chased Tigisaki and his ten novitiates through the swamps to the edge of the Old Man's Country. Another week he spent prying into strange rites which had been performed in the sickle light of the moon. It was a ghastly business, involved certain unpleasant diggings, but in the end the Leopard's claws were drawn and Bones and his twenty soldiers ploughed through the forest to the Isisi city, and there he sat in judgement in the little palaver house on the verge of the river.
M'anin came, full of faith in his magical conversation, though he stood between two Houssas with fixed bayonets.
"I see you, Tibbetti," he said, with easy insolence. "Now I will tell you truly, for in the full of the moon there came a new strong spirit into me, and it seemed that the soul of a strong white man had come to my heart."
"Eh?" said Bones, who was instantly the student of psychology. It was in the full of the moon that the truculent Major Omes had been struck down in his pride.
"That is what my heart felt," said M'anin; "an I can speak to you without fear, for you are only a small man and very foolish. You are like a child, and men laugh at you. I have seen none so like the little monkey who sits on the trees."
Bones listened agape, and, satisfied with the impression he had made, M'anin the talker went on.
"Now you shall leave me and these people and go away," he said; "and I will bring the Leopards back. For did I not raise them up when they were dead, and teach them to go into the forest with claws, and sit while they danced and made their magic? This I tell you because I do not fear you. You are like a fish—"
Suddenly Bones' accusative finger shot out. "Omes, dear old boy," he squeaked in English, "you've got into the wrong body—and you're for it!" He turned to Sergeant Abiboo.
"O man, put a rope on that tree," he said.