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If Downing Street were to send that frantic code-wire to "Polonius" to Hamilton in these days he could not obey the instructions, for reasons which I will give. As a matter of fact the code has now been changed, Lieutenant Tibbetts being mainly responsible for the alteration.

Hamilton, in his severest mood, wrote a letter to Bones, and it is worth reproducing.

That Bones was living a dozen yards from Captain Hamilton, and that they shared a common mess-table, adds rather than distracts from the seriousness of the correspondence. The letter ran:

"The Residency, "September 24th.

"From Officer commanding Houssas detachment Headquarters, to Officer commanding "B" company of Houssas.

"Sir,--

"I have the honour to direct your attention to that paragraph of King's regulations which directs that an officer's sole attention should be concentrated upon executing the lawful commands of his superior.

"I have had occasion recently to correct a certain tendency on your part to employing War Department property and the servants of the Crown for your own special use. I need hardly point out to you that such conduct on your part is subversive to discipline and directly contrary to the spirit and letter of regulations. More especially would I urge the impropriety of utilizing government telegraph lines for the purpose of securing information regarding your gambling transactions. Matters have now reached a very serious crisis, and I feel sure that you will see the necessity for refraining from these breaches of discipline.

"I have the honour to be, sir, "Your obedient servant, "P. G. Hamilton, 'Captain.'"

When two white men, the only specimen of their race and class within a radius of hundreds of miles, are living together in an isolated post, they either hate or tolerate one another. The exception must always be found in two men of a similar service having similar objects to gain, and infused with a common spirit of endeavour.

Fortunately neither Lieutenant Tibbetts nor his superior were long enough associated to get upon one another's nerves.

Lieutenant Tibbetts received this letter while he was shaving, and came across the parade ground outrageously attired in his pyjamas and his helmet. Clambering up the wooden stairs, his slippers flap-flapping across the broad verandah, he burst into the chief's bedroom, interrupting a stern and frigid Captain Hamilton in the midst of his early morning coffee and roll.

"Look here, old sport," said Bones, indignantly waving a frothy shaving brush at the other, "what the dooce is all this about?"

He displayed a crumpled letter.

"Lieutenant Tibbetts," said Hamilton of the Houssas severely, "have you no sense of decency?"

"Sense of decency, my dear old thing!" repeated Bones. "I am simply full of it. That is why I have come."

A terrible sight was Bones at that early hour with the open pyjama jacket showing his scraggy neck, with his fish mouth drooping dismally, his round, staring eyes and his hair rumpled up, one frantic tuft at the back standing up in isolation.

Hamilton stared at him, and it was the stern stare of a disciplinarian. But Bones was not to be put out of countenance by so small a thing as an icy glance.

"There is no sense in getting peevish with me, old Ham," he said, squatting down on the nearest chair; "this is what I call a stupid, officious, unnecessary letter. Why this haughtiness? Why these crushing inferences? Why this unkindness to poor old Bones?"

"The fact of it is, Bones," said Hamilton, accepting the situation, "you are spending too much of your time in the telegraph station."

Bones got up slowly.

"Captain Hamilton, sir!" he said reproachfully, "after all I have done for you."

"Beyond selling me one of your beastly sweepstake tickets for five shillings," said Hamilton, unpleasantly; "a ticket which I dare say you have taken jolly good care will not win a prize, I fail to see in what manner you have helped me. Now, Bones, you will have to pay more attention to your work. There is no sense in slacking; we will have Sanders back here before we know where we are, and when he starts nosing round there will be a lot of trouble. Besides, you are shirking."

"Me!" gasped Bones, outraged. "Me--shirking? You forget yourself, sir!"

Even Bones could not be dignified with a lather brush in one hand and a half-shaven cheek, testifying to the hastiness of his departure from his quarters.

"I only wish to say, sir," said Bones, "that during the period I have had the honour to serve under your command I have settled possibly more palavers of a distressingly ominous character than the average Commissioner is called upon to settle in the course of a year."

"As you have created most of the palavers yourself," said Hamilton unkindly, "I do not deny this. In other words, you have got yourself into more tangles, and you've had to crawl out more often."

"It is useless appealing to your better nature, sir," said Bones.

He saluted with the hand that held the lather brush, turned about like an automaton, tripped over the mat, recovered himself with an effort, and preserving what dignity a man can preserve in pink-striped pyjamas and a sun helmet, stalked majestically back to his quarters. Half-way across he remembered something and came doubling back, clattering into Hamilton's room unceremoniously.

"There is one thing I forgot to say," he said, "about those sweepstake tickets. If I happen to be killed on any future expedition that you may send me, you will understand that the whole of my moveable property is yours, absolutely. And I may add, sir," he said at the doorway with one hand on the lintel ready to execute a strategic flank movement out of range, "that with this legacy I offer you my forgiveness for the perfectly beastly time you have given me. Good morning, sir."

There was a commanding officer's parade of Houssas at noon. It was not until he stalked across the square and clicked his heels together as he reported the full strength of his company present that Hamilton saw his subordinate again.

The parade over, Bones went huffily to his quarters.

He was hurt. To be told he had been shirking his duty touched a very tender and sensitive spot of his.

In preparation for the movement which he had expected to make he had kept his company on the move for a fortnight. For fourteen terrible days in all kinds of weather, he had worked like a native in the forest; with sham fights and blank cartridge attacks upon imaginary positions, with scaling of stockades and building of bridges--all work at which his soul revolted--to be told at the end he had shirked his work!

Certainly he had come down to headquarters more often perhaps than was necessary, but then he was properly interested in the draw of a continental sweepstake which might, with any kind of luck, place him in the possession of a considerable fortune. Hamilton was amiable at lunch, even communicative at dinner, and for him rather serious.

For if the truth be told he was desperately worried. The cause was, as it had often been with Sanders, that French-German-Belgian territory which adjoins the Ochori country. All the bad characters, not only the French of the Belgian Congo, but of the badly-governed German lands--all the tax resisters, the murderers, and the criminals of every kind, but the lawless contingents of every nation, formed a floating nomadic population in the tree-covered hills which lay beyond the country governed by Bosambo.

Of late there had been a larger break-away than usual. A strong force of rebellious natives was reported to be within a day's march of the Ochori boundary. This much Hamilton knew. But he had known of such occurrences before; not once, but a score of times had alarming news come from the French border.

He had indeed made many futile trips into the heart of the Ochori country.

Forced marches through little known territory, and long and tiring waits for the invader that never came, had dulled his senses of apprehension. He had to take a chance. The Administrator's office would warn him from time to time, and ask him conventionally to make his arrangements to meet all contingencies and Sanders would as conventionally reply that the condition of affairs on the Ochori border was engaging his most earnest attention.

"What is the use of worrying about it now?" asked Bones at dinner.

Hamilton shook his head.

"There was a certain magic in old Sanders' name," he said.

Bones' lips pursed.

"My dear old chap," he said, "there is a bit of magic in mine."

"I have not noticed it," said Hamilton.

"I am getting awfully popular as a matter of fact," said Bones complacently. "The last time I was up the river, Bosambo came ten miles down stream to meet me and spend the day."

"Did you lose anything?" asked Hamilton ungraciously.

Bones thought.

"Now you come to mention it," he said slowly, "I did lose quite a lot of things, but dear old Bosambo wouldn't play a dirty trick on a pal. I know Bosambo."

"If there is one thing more evident than another," said Hamilton, "it is that you do not know Bosambo."

Hamilton was wakened at three in the next morning by the telegraph operator. It was a "clear the line" message, coded from headquarters, and half awake he went into Sanders' study and put it into plain English.

"Hope you are watching the Ochori border," it ran, "representations from French Government to the effect that a crossing is imminent."

He pulled his mosquito boots on over his pyjamas, struggled into a coat and crossed to Lieutenant Tibbetts' quarters.

Bones occupied a big hut at the end of the Houssa lines, and Hamilton woke him by the simple expedient of flashing his electric hand lamp in his face.

"I have had a telegram," he said, and Bones leapt out of bed wide awake in an instant.

"I knew jolly well I would draw a horse," he said exultantly. "I had a dream----"

"Be serious, you feather-minded devil."

With that Hamilton handed him the telegram.

Bones read it carefully, and interpreted any meanings into its construction which it could not possibly bear.

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

"There is only one thing to do," said Hamilton. "We shall have to take all the men we can possibly muster, and go north at daybreak."

"Spoken like a jolly old Hannibal," said Bones heartily, and smacked his superior on the back. A shrill bugle call aroused the sleeping lines, and Hamilton went back to his quarters to make preparations for the journey. In the first grey light of dawn he flew three pigeons to Bosambo, and the message they carried about their red legs was brief.

"Take your fighting regiments to the edge of Frenchi land; presently I will come with my soldiers and support you. Let no foreigner pass on your life and on your head."

When the rising sun tipped the tops of the palms with gold, and the wild world was filled with the sound of the birds, the _Zaire_, her decks alive with soldiers, began her long journey northward.

Just before the boat left, Hamilton received a further message from the Administrator. It was in plain English, some evidence of Sir Robert Sanleigh's haste.

"Confidential: This matter on the Ochori border extremely delicate. Complete adequate arrangements to keep in touch with me."

For one moment Hamilton conceived the idea of leaving Bones behind to deal with the telegram and come along. A little thought, however, convinced him of the futility of this method. For one thing he would want every bit of assistance he could get, and although Bones had his disadvantages he was an excellent soldier, and a loyal and gallant comrade.

It might be necessary for Hamilton to divide up his forces; in which case he could hardly dispense with Lieutenant Tibbetts, and he explained unnecessarily to Bones:

"I think you are much better under my eye where I can see what you're doing."

"Sir," said Bones very seriously, "it is not what I do, it is what I think. If you could only see my brain at work----"

"Ha, ha!" said Hamilton rudely.

For at least three days relations were strained between the two officers. Bones was a man who admitted at regular intervals that he was unduly sensitive. He had explained this disadvantage to Hamilton at various times, but the Houssa stolidly refused to remember the fact.

Most of the way up the river Hamilton attended to his business navigation--he knew the stream very well--whilst Bones, in a cabin which had been rigged up for him in the after part of the ship, played Patience, and by a systematic course of cheating himself was able to accomplish marvels. They found the Ochori city deserted save for a strong guard, for Bosambo had marched the day previous; sending a war call through the country.

He had started with a thousand spears, and his force was growing in snowball fashion as he progressed through the land. The great road which Notiki, the northern chief, had started by way of punishment was beginning to take shape. Bosambo had moved with incredible swiftness.

Too swift, indeed, for a certain Angolian-Congo robber who had headed a villainous pilgrimage to a land which, as he had predicted, flowed with milk and honey; was guarded by timorous men and mainly populated by slim and beautiful maidens. The Blue Books on this migration gave this man's name as Kisini, but he was in fact an Angolian named Bizaro--a composite name which smacks suspiciously of Portuguese influence.

Many times had the unruly people and the lawless bands which occupied the forest beyond the Ochori threatened to cross into British territory. But the dangers of the unknown, the awful stories of a certain white lord who was swift to avenge and monstrously inquisitive had held them. Year after year there had grown up tribes within tribes, tiny armed camps that had only this in common, that they were outside the laws from which they had fled, and that somewhere to the southward and the eastward were strong forces flying the tricolour of France or the yellow star of the Belgian Congo, ready to belch fire at them, if they so much as showed their flat noses.

It would have needed a Napoleon to have combined all the conflicting forces, to have lulled all the mutual suspicions, and to have moulded these incompatible particles into a whole; but, Bizaro, like many another vain and ambitious man, had sought by means of a great palaver to produce a feeling of security sufficiently soothing to the nerves and susceptibilities of all elements, to create something like a nationality of these scattered remnants of the nations.

And though he failed, he did succeed in bringing together four or five of the camps, and it was this news carried to the French Governor by spies, transmitted to Downing Street, and flashed back again to the Coast, which set Hamilton and his Houssas moving; which brought a regiment of the King's African Rifles to the Coast ready to reinforce the earlier expedition, and which (more to the point) had put Bosambo's war drums rumbling from one end of the Ochori to the other.

Bizaro, mustering his force, came gaily through the sun-splashed aisles of the forest, his face streaked hideously with camwood, his big elephant spear twirled between his fingers, and behind him straggled his cosmopolitan force.

There were men from the Congo and the French Congo; men from German lands; from Angola; wanderers from far-off Barotseland, who had drifted on to the Congo by the swift and yellow Kasai. There were hunters from the forests of far-off Bongindanga where the _okapi_ roams. For each man's presence in that force there was good and sinister reason, for these were no mere tax-evaders, poor, starved wretches fleeing from the rule which _Bula Matadi_[4] imposed. There was a blood price on almost every head, and in a dozen prisons at Boma, at Brazaville, and Equatorville, and as far south as St. Paul de Loduda, there were leg-irons which had at some time or other fitted their scarred ankles.

[Footnote 4: The stone breaker, the native name for the Congo Government.]

Now there are four distinct physical features which mark the border line between the border land and the foreign territory. Mainly the line is a purely imaginary one, not traceable save by the most delicate instruments--a line which runs through a tangle of forest.

But the most noticeable crossing place is N'glili.[5]

[Footnote 5: Probably a corruption of the word "English."]

Here a little river, easily fordable, and not more than a dozen spear lengths across flows from one wood into another. Between the two woods is a clear space of thick grass and shrub. In the spring of the year the banks of the stream are white with arum-lilies, and the field beyond, at a later period, is red with wild anemone.

The dour fugitives on the other side of the stream have a legend that those who safely cross the "Field of Blood"--so they call the anemone-sprinkled land beyond--without so much as crushing a flower may claim sanctuary under the British flag.

So that when Bizaro sighted the stream, and the two tall trees that flanked the ford, from afar off and said: "To-day we will walk between the flowers," he was signifying the definite character of his plans.

"Master," said one of the more timid of his muster, when they had halted for a rest in sight of the promised land, "what shall we do when we come to these strange places?"

"We shall defeat all manner of men," said Bizaro optimistically. "Afterwards they shall come and sue for peace, and they shall give us a wide land where we may build us huts and sow our corn. And they also will give us women, and we shall settle in comfort, and I will be chief over you. And, growing with the moons, in time I shall make you a great nation."

They might have crossed the stream that evening and committed themselves irrevocably to their invasion. Bizaro was a criminal, and a lazy man, and he decided to sleep where he was--an act fatal to the smooth performance of his enterprise, for when in the early hours of the morning he marched his horde to the N'glili river he found two thousand spears lining the opposite bank, and they were under a chief who was at once insolent and unmoved by argument.

"O chief," said Bosambo pleasantly, "you do not cross my beautiful flowers to-day."

"Lord," said Bizaro humbly, "we are poor men who desire a new land."

"That you shall have," said Bosambo grimly, "for I have sent my warriors to dig big holes wherein you may take your rest in this land you desire."

An unhappy Bizaro carried his six hundred spears slowly back to the land from whence he had come and found on return to the mixed tribes that he had unconsciously achieved a miracle. For the news of armed men by the N'glili river carried terror to these evil men--they found themselves between two enemies and chose the force which they feared least.

On the fourth day following his interview with Bosambo, Bizaro led five thousand desperate men to the ford and there was a sanguinary battle which lasted for the greater part of the morning and was repeated at sundown.

Hamilton brought his Houssas up in the nick of time, when one wing of Bosambo's force was being thrust back and when Bizaro's desperate adventurers had gained the Ochori bank. Hamilton came through the clearing, and formed his men rapidly.

Sword in hand, in advance of the glittering bayonets, Bones raced across the red field, and after one brief and glorious mle the invader was driven back, and a dropping fire from the left, as the Houssas shot steadily at the flying enemy, completed the disaster to Bizaro's force.

"That settles _that_!" said Hamilton.

He had pitched his camp on the scene of his exploit, the bivouac fires of the Houssas gleamed redly amongst the anemones.

"Did you see me in action?" asked Bones, a little self-consciously.

"No, I didn't notice anything particularly striking about the fight in your side of the world," said Hamilton.

"I suppose you did not see me bowl over a big Congo chap?" asked Bones, carelessly, as he opened a tin of preserved tongue. "Two at once I bowled over," he repeated.

"What do you expect me to do?" asked Hamilton unpleasantly. "Get up and cheer, or recommend you for the Victoria Cross or something?"

Bones carefully speared a section of tongue from the open tin before he replied.

"I had not thought about the Victoria Cross, to tell you the truth," he admitted; "but if you feel that you ought to recommend me for something or other for conspicuous courage in the face of the enemy, do not let your friendship stand in the way."

"I will not," said Hamilton.

There was a little pause, then without raising his eyes from the task in hand which was at that precise moment the covering of a biscuit with a large and generous layer of marmalade, Bones went on.

"I practically saved the life of one of Bosambo's headmen. He was on the ground and three fellows were jabbing at him. The moment they saw me they dropped their spears and fled."

"I expect it was your funny nose that did the trick," said Hamilton unimpressed.

"I stood there," Bones went on loftily ignoring the gratuitous insult, "waiting for anything that might turn up; exposed, dear old fellow, to every death-dealing missile, but calmly directing, if you will allow me to say so, the tide of battle. It was," he added modestly, "one of the bravest deeds I ever saw."

He waited, but Hamilton had his mouth full of tongue sandwich.

"If you mention me in dispatches," Bones went on suggestively.

"Don't worry--I shan't," said Hamilton.

"But if you did," persisted Lieutenant Tibbetts, poising his sticky biscuit, "I can only say----"

"The marmalade is running down your sleeve," said Hamilton; "shut up, Bones, like a good chap."

Bones sighed.

"The fact of it is, Hamilton," he was frank enough to say, "I have been serving so far without hope of reward and scornful of honour, but now I have reached the age and the position in life where I feel I am entitled to some slight recognition to solace my declining years."

"How long have you been in the army?" asked Hamilton, curiously.

"Eighteen months," replied Bones; "nineteen months next week, and it's a jolly long time, I can tell you, sir."

Leaving his dissatisfied subordinate, Hamilton made the round of the camp. The red field, as he called it, was in reality a low-lying meadow, which rose steeply to the bank of the river on the one side and more steeply--since it first sloped downward in that direction--to the Ochori forest, two miles away. He made this discovery with a little feeling of alarm. He knew something of native tactics, and though his scouts had reported that the enemy was effectually routed, and that the nearest body was five miles away, he put a strong advance picquet on the other side of the river, and threw a wide cordon of sentries about the camp. Especially he apportioned Abiboo, his own sergeant, the task of watching the little river which flowed swiftly between its orderly banks past the sunken camp. For two days Abiboo watched and found nothing to report.

Not so the spies who were keeping watch upon the moving remnants of Bizaro's army.

They came with the news that the main body had mysteriously disappeared. To add to Hamilton's anxiety he received a message by way of headquarters and the Ochori city from the Administrator.

"Be prepared at the first urgent message from myself to fall back on the Ochori city. German Government claim that whole of country for two miles north of river N'glili is their territory. Most delicate situation. International complications feared. Rely on your discretion, but move swiftly if you receive orders."

"Leave this to me," said Bones when Hamilton read the message out; "did I ever tell you, sir, that I was intended for the diplomatic service----"

* * * * *

The truth about the Ochori border has never been thoroughly exposed. If you get into your mind the fact that the Imperialists of four nations were dreaming dreams of a trans-African railway which was to tap the resources of the interior, and if you remember that each patriotic dreamer conceived a different kind of railway according to his nationality and that they only agreed upon one point, namely, that the line must point contiguous with the Ochori border, you may understand dimly some reason for the frantic claim that that little belt of territory, two miles wide, was part of the domain of each and every one of the contestants.

When the news was flashed to Europe that a party of British Houssas were holding the banks of the N'glili river, and had inflicted a loss upon a force of criminals, the approval which civilization should rightly have bestowed upon Captain Hamilton and his heroic lieutenant was tempered largely by the question as to whether Captain Hamilton and his Houssas had any right whatever to be upon "the red field." And in consequence the telegraph lines between Berlin and Paris and Paris and London and London and Brussels were kept fairly busy with passionate statements of claims couched in the stilted terminology of diplomacy.

England could not recede from the position she had taken. This she said in French and in German, and in her own perfidious tongue. She stated this uncompromisingly, but at the same time sent secret orders to withdraw the force that was the bone of contention. This order she soon countermanded. A certain speech delivered by a too voluble Belgian minister was responsible for the stiffening of her back, and His Excellency the Administrator of the territory received official instructions in the middle of the night: "Tell Hamilton to stay where he is and hold border against all comers."

This message was re-transmitted.

Now there is in existence in the British Colonial Service, and in all branches which affect the agents and the servants of the Colonial Office, an emergency code which is based upon certain characters in Shakespearean plays.

I say "there is"; perhaps it would be better and more to the point if I said "there was," since the code has been considerably amended.

Thus, be he sub-inspector or commissioner, or chief of local native police who receives the word "Ophelia," he knows without consulting any book that "Ophelia" means "unrest of natives reported in your district, please report"; or if it be "Polonius" it signifies to him--and this he knows without confirming his knowledge--that he must move steadily forward. Or if it be "Banquo" he reads into it, "Hold your position till further orders." And "Banquo" was the word that the Administrator telegraphed.

* * * * *

Sergeant Abiboo had sat by the flowing N'glili river without noticing any slackening of its strength or challenging of its depth.

There was reason for this.

Bizaro, who was in the forest ten miles to the westward, and working moreover upon a piece of native strategy which natives the world over had found successful, saw that it was unnecessary to dam the river and divert the stream.

Nature had assisted him to a marvellous degree. He had followed the stream through the forest until he reached a place where it was a quarter of a mile wide, so wide and so newly spread that the water reached half-way up the trunks of the sodden and dying trees.

Moreover, there was a bank through which a hundred men might cut a breach in a day or so, even though they went about their work most leisurely, being constitutionally averse to manual labour.

Bizaro was no engineer, but he had all the forest man's instincts of water-levels. There was a clear run down to the meadows beyond that, as he said, he "smelt."

"We will drown these dogs," he said to his headman, "and afterwards we will walk into the country and take it for our own."

Hamilton had been alive to the danger of such an attack. He saw by certain indications of the soil that this great shallow valley had been inundated more than once, though probably many years had passed since the last overflow of water. Yet he could not move from where he had planted himself without risking the displeasure of his chief and without also risking very serious consequences in other directions.

Bosambo, frankly bored, was all for retiring his men to the comforts of the Ochori city.

"Lord, why do we sit here?" he asked, "looking at this little stream which has no fish and at this great ugly country, when I have my beautiful city for your lordship's reception, and dancing folk and great feasts?"

"A doocid sensible idea," murmured Bones.

"I wait for a book," answered Hamilton shortly. "If you wish to go, you may take your soldiers and leave me."

"Lord," said Bosambo, "you put shame on me," and he looked his reproach.

"I am really surprised at you, Hamilton," murmured Bones.

"Keep your infernal comments to yourself," snapped his superior. "I tell you I must wait for my instructions."

He was a silent man for the rest of the evening, and had settled himself down in his canvas chair to doze away the night, when a travel-stained messenger came from the Ochori and he brought a telegram of one word.

Hamilton looked at it, he looked too with a frown at the figures that preceded it.

"And what you mean," he muttered, "the Lord knows!"

The word, however, was sufficiently explicit. A bugle call brought the Houssas into line and the tapping of Bosambo's drums assembled his warriors.

Within half an hour of the receipt of the message Hamilton's force was on the move.

They crossed the great stretch of meadow in the darkness and were climbing up towards the forest when a noise like thunder broke upon their ears.

Such a roaring, crashing, hissing of sound came nearer and nearer, increasing in volume every second. The sky was clear, and one swift glance told Hamilton that it was not a storm he had to fear. And then it came upon him, and he realized what this commotion meant.

"Run!" he cried, and with one accord naked warriors and uniformed Houssas fled through the darkness to the higher ground. The water came rushing about Hamilton's ankles, one man slipped back again into the flood and was hauled out again by Bones, exclaiming loudly his own act lest it should have escaped the attention of his superior, and the party reached safety without the loss of a man.

"Just in time," said Hamilton grimly. "I wonder if the Administrator knew this was going to happen?"

They came to the Ochori by easy marches, and Hamilton wrote a long wire to headquarters sending it on ahead by a swift messenger.

It was a dispatch which cleared away many difficulties, for the disputed territory was for everlasting under water, and where the "red field" had blazed brilliantly was a calm stretch of river two miles wide filled with strange silent brown objects that floated and bobbed to the movement of the tide. These were the men who in their folly had loosened the waters and died of their rashness. Most notable of these was Bizaro.

There was a shock waiting for Hamilton when he reached the Ochori city. The wire from the Administrator was kindly enough and sufficiently approving to satisfy even an exigent Bones. "But," it ran, "why did you retire in face of stringent orders to remain? I wired you 'Banquo.'"

Hamilton afterwards learnt that the messenger carrying this important dispatch had passed his party in their retirement through the forest.

"Banquo," quoted Hamilton in amazement. "I received absolute instructions to retire."

"Hard cheese," said Bones, sympathetically. "His dear old Excellency wants a good talking to; but are you sure, dear old chap, that you haven't made a mistake."

"Here it is," he said, "but I must confess that I don't understand the numbers."

He handed it to Bones. It read:

"Mercutio 17178."

Bones looked at it a moment, then gasped. He reached out his hand solemnly and grasped that of the astounded Hamilton.

"Dear old fellow," he said in a broken voice, "Congratulate me, I have drawn a runner!"

"A runner?"

"A runner, dear old sport," chortled Bones, "in the Cambridgeshire! You see I've got a ticket number seventeen, seventeen eight in my pocket, dear old friend! If Mercutio wins," he repeated solemnly, "I will stand you the finest dinner that can be secured this side of Romano's."

CHAPTER VI

THE SOUL OF THE NATIVE WOMAN

Mail day is ever a day of supreme interest for the young and for the matter of that for the middle-aged, too. Sanders hated mail days because the bulk of his correspondence had to do with Government, and Government never sat down with a pen in its hand to wish Sanders many happy returns of the day or to tell him scandalous stories about mutual friends.

Rather the Government (by inference) told him scandalous stories about himself--of work not completed to the satisfaction of Downing Street--a thoroughfare given to expecting miracles.

Hamilton had a sister who wrote wittily and charmingly every week, and there was another girl ... Still, two letters and a bright pink paper or two made a modest postbag by the side of Lieutenant Tibbetts' mail.

There came to Bones every mail day a thick wad of letters and parcels innumerable, and he could sit at the big table for hours on end, whistling a little out of tune, mumbling incoherently. He had a trick of commenting upon his letters aloud, which was very disconcerting for Hamilton. Bones wouldn't open a letter and get half-way through it before he began his commenting.

"... poor soul ... dear! dear! ... what a silly old ass ... ah, would you ... don't do it, Billy...."

To Hamilton's eyes the bulk of correspondence rather increased than diminished.

"You must owe a lot of money," he said one day.

"Eh!"

"All these...!" Hamilton opened his hand to a floor littered with discarded envelopes. "I suppose they represent demands...."

"Dear lad," said Bones brightly, "they represent popularity--I'm immensely popular, sir," he gulped a little as he fished out two dainty envelopes from the pile before him; "you may not have experienced the sensation, but I assure you, sir, it's pleasing, it's doocidly pleasing!"

"Complacent ass," said Hamilton, and returned to his own correspondence.

Systematically Bones went through his letters, now and again consulting a neat little morocco-covered note-book. (It would appear he kept a very careful record of every letter he wrote home, its contents, the date of its dispatch, and the reply thereto.) He had reduced letter writing to a passion, spent most of his evenings writing long epistles to his friends--mostly ladies of a tender age--and had incidentally acquired a reputation in the Old Country for his brilliant powers of narrative.

This, Hamilton discovered quite by accident. It would appear that Hamilton's sister had been on a visit--was in fact on the visit when she wrote one letter which so opened Hamilton's eyes--and mentioned that she was staying with some great friends of Bones'. She did not, of course, call him "Bones," but "Mr. Tibbetts."

"I should awfully like to meet him," she wrote, "he must be a very interesting man. Aggie Vernon had a letter from him yesterday wherein he described his awful experience lion-hunting.

"To be chased by a lion and caught and then carried to the beast's lair must have been awful!

"Mr. Tibbetts is very modest about it in his letter, and beyond telling Aggie that he escaped by sticking his finger in the lion's eye he says little of his subsequent adventure. By the way, Pat, Aggie tells me that you had a bad bout of fever and that Mr. Tibbetts carried you for some miles to the nearest doctor. I wish you wouldn't keep these things so secret, it worries me dreadfully unless you tell me--even the worst about yourself. I hope your interesting friend returned safely from his dangerous expedition into the interior--he was on the point of leaving when his letter was dispatched and was quite gloomy about his prospects...."

Hamilton read this epistle over and over again, then he sent for Bones.

That gentleman came most cheerfully, full of fine animal spirits, and----

"Just had a letter about you, Bones," said Hamilton carelessly.

"About me, sir!" said Bones; "from the War Office--I'm not being decorated or anything!" he asked anxiously.

"No--nothing so tragic; it was a letter from my sister, who is staying with the Vernons."

"Oh!" said Bones going suddenly red.

"What a modest devil you are," said the admiring Hamilton, "having a lion hunt all to yourself and not saying a word about it to anybody."

Bones made curious apologetic noises.

"I didn't know there were any lions in the country," pursued Hamilton remorselessly. "Liars, yes! But lions, no! I suppose you brought them with you--and I suppose you know also, Bones, that it is considered in lion-hunting circles awfully rude to stick your finger into a lion's eye? It is bad sportsmanship to say the least, and frightfully painful for the lion."

Bones was making distressful grimaces.

"How would you like a lion to stick his finger in _your_ eye?" asked Hamilton severely; "and, by the way, Bones, I have to thank you."

He rose solemnly, took the hand of his reluctant and embarrassed second and wrung.

"Thank you," said Hamilton, in a broken voice, "for saving my life."

"Oh, I say, sir," began Bones feebly.

"To carry a man eighty miles on your back is no mean accomplishment, Bones--especially when I was unconscious----"

"I don't say you were unconscious, sir. In fact, sir----" floundered Lieutenant Tibbetts as red as a peony.

"And yet I was unconscious," insisted Hamilton firmly. "I am still unconscious, even to this day. I have no recollection of your heroic effort, Bones, I thank you."

"Well, sir," said Bones, "to make a clean breast of the whole affair----"

"And this dangerous expedition of yours, Bones, an expedition from which you might never return--that," said Hamilton in a hushed voice, "is the best story I have heard for years."

"Sir," said Bones, speaking under the stress of considerable emotion, "I am clean bowled, sir. The light-hearted fairy stories which I wrote to cheer, so to speak, the sick-bed of an innocent child, sir, they have recoiled upon my own head. _Peccavi, mea culpi_, an' all those jolly old expressions that you'll find in the back pages of the dictionary."

"Oh, Bones, Bones!" chuckled Hamilton.

"You mustn't think I'm a perfect liar, sir," began Bones, earnestly.

"I don't think you're a perfect liar," answered Hamilton, "I think you're the most inefficient liar I've ever met."

"Not even a liar, I'm a romancist, sir," Bones stiffened with dignity and saluted, but whether he was saluting Hamilton, or the spirit of Romance, or in sheer admiration was saluting himself, Hamilton did not know.

"The fact is, sir," said Bones confidentially, "I'm writing a book!"

He stepped back as though to better observe the effect of his words.

"What about?" asked Hamilton, curiously.

"About things I've seen and things I know," said Bones, in his most impressive manner.

"Oh, I see!" said Hamilton, "one of those waistcoat pocket books."

Bones swallowed the insult with a gulp.

"I've been asked to write a book," he said; "my adventures an' all that sort of thing. Of course they needn't have happened, really----"

"In that case, Bones, I'm with you," said Hamilton; "if you're going to write a book about things that haven't happened to you, there's no limit to its size."

"You're bein' a jolly cruel old officer, sir," said Bones, pained by the cold cynicism of his chief. "But I'm very serious, sir. This country is full of material. And everybody says I ought to write a book about it--why, dash it, sir, I've been here nearly two months!"

"It seems years," said Hamilton.

Bones was perfectly serious, as he had said. He did intend preparing a book for publication, had dreams of a great literary career, and an ultimate membership of the Athenum Club belike. It had come upon him like a revelation that such a career called him. The week after he had definitely made up his mind to utilize his gifts in this direction, his outgoing mail was heavier than ever. For to three and twenty English and American publishers, whose names he culled from a handy work of reference, he advanced a business-like offer to prepare for the press a volume "of 316 pages printed in type about the same size as enclosed," and to be entitled:

MY WILD LIFE AMONGST CANNIBALS.

BY

AUGUSTUS TIBBETTS, Lieutenant of Houssas.

Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society; Member of the Ethnological Society and Junior Army Service Club.

Bones had none of these qualifications, save the latter, but as he told himself he'd jolly soon be made a member if his book was a howling success.

No sooner had his letters been posted than he changed his mind, and he addressed three and twenty more letters to the publishers, altering the title to:

THE TYRANNY OF THE WILDS.

Being Some Observations on the Habits and Customs of Savage Peoples.

BY

AUGUSTUS TIBBETTS (LT.).

With a Foreword by Captain Patrick Hamilton.

"You wouldn't mind writing a foreword, dear old fellow?" he asked.

"Charmed," said Hamilton. "Have you a particular preference for any form?"

"Just please yourself, sir," said a delighted Bones, so Hamilton covered two sheets of foolscap with an appreciation which began:

"The audacity of the author of this singularly uninformed work is to be admired without necessarily being imitated. Two months' residence in a land which offered many opportunities for acquiring inaccurate data, has resulted in a work which must stand for all time as a monument of murderous effort," etc.

Bones read the appreciation very carefully.

"Dear old sport," he said, a little troubled, as he reached the end; "this is almost uncomplimentary."

You couldn't depress Bones or turn him from his set purpose. He scribed away, occupying his leisure moments with his great work. His normal correspondence suffered cruelly, but Bones was relentless. Hamilton sent him north to collect the hut tax, and at first Bones resented this order, believing that it was specially designed to hamper him.

"Of course, sir," he said, "I'll obey you, if you order me in accordance with regulations an' all that sort of rot, but believe me, sir, you're doin' an injury to literature. Unborn generations, sir, will demand an explanation----"

"Get out!" said Hamilton crossly.

Bones found his trip a blessing that had been well disguised. There were many points of interest on which he required first-hand information. He carried with him to the _Zaire_ large exercise books on which he had pasted such pregnant labels as "Native Customs," "Dances," "Ju-jus," "Ancient Legends," "Folk-lore," etc. They were mostly blank, and represented projected chapters of his great work.

All might have been well with Bones. More virgin pages might easily have been covered with his sprawling writing and the book itself, converted into honest print, have found its way, in the course of time, into the tuppenny boxes of the Farringdon book-mart, sharing its soiled magnificence with the work of the best of us, but on his way Bones had a brilliant inspiration. There was a chapter he had not thought of, a chapter heading which had not been born to his mind until that flashing moment of genius.

Upon yet another exercise book, he pasted the label of a chapter which was to eclipse all others in interest. Behold then, this enticing announcement, boldly printed and ruled about with double lines:

"THE SOUL OF THE NATIVE WOMAN."

It was a fine chapter title. It was sonorous, it had dignity, it was full of possibilities. "The Soul of the Native Woman," repeated Bones, in an ecstasy of self-admiration, and having chosen his subject he proceeded to find out something about it.

Now, about this time, Bosambo of the Ochori might, had he wished and had he the literary quality, have written many books about women, if for no other reason than because of a certain girl named D'riti.

She was a woman of fifteen, grown to a splendid figure, with a proud head and a chin that tilted in contempt, for she was the daughter of Bosambo's chief counsellor, grand-daughter of an Ochori king, and ambitious to be wife of Bosambo himself.

"This is a mad thing," said Bosambo when her father offered the suggestion; "for, as you know, T'meli, I have one wife who is a thousand wives to me."

"Lord, I will be ten thousand," said D'riti, present at the interview and bold; "also, Lord, it was predicted at my birth that I should marry a king and the greater than a king."

"That is me," said Bosambo, who was without modesty; "yet, it cannot be."

So they married D'riti to a chief's son who beat her till one day she broke his thick head with an iron pot, whereupon he sent her back to her father demanding the return of his dowry and the value of his pot.

She had her following, for she was a dancer of fame and could twist her lithe body into enticing shapes. She might have married again, but she was so scornful of common men that none dare ask for her. Also the incident of the iron pot was not forgotten, and D'riti went swaying through the village--she walked from her hips, gracefully--a straight, brown, girl-woman desired and unasked.

For she knew men too well to inspire confidence in them. By some weird intuition which certain women of all races acquire, she had probed behind their minds and saw with their eyes, and when she spoke of men, she spoke with a conscious authority, and such men, who were within earshot of her vitriolic comments, squirmed uncomfortably, and called her a woman of shame.

So matters stood when the _Zaire_ came flashing to the Ochori city and the heart of Bones filled with pleasant anticipation.

Who was so competent to inform him on the matter of the souls of native women as Bosambo of the Ochori, already a crony of Bones, and admirable, if for no other reason, because he professed an open reverence for his new master? At any rate, after the haggle of tax collection was finished, Bones set about his task.

"Bosambo," said he, "men say you are very wise. Now tell me something about the women of the Ochori."

Bosambo looked at Bones a little startled.

"Lord," said he, "who knows about women? For is it not written in the blessed Sura of the Djin that women and death are beyond understanding?"

"That may be true," said Bones, "yet, behold, I make a book full of wise and wonderful things and it would be neither wise nor wonderful if there was no word of women."

And he explained very seriously indeed that he desired to know of the soul of native womanhood, of her thoughts and her dreams and her high desires.

"Lord," said Bosambo, after a long thought, "go to your ship: presently I will send to you a girl who thinks and speaks with great wisdom--and if she talks with you, you shall learn more things than I can tell you."

To the _Zaire_ at sundown came D'riti, a girl of proper height, hollow backed, bare to the waist, with a thin skirting of fine silk cloth which her father had brought from the Coast, wound tightly about her, yet not so tightly that it hampered her swaying, lazy walk. She stood before a disconcerted Bones, one small hand resting on her hip, her chin (as usual) tilted down at him from under lashes uncommonly long for a native.

Also, this Bones saw, she was gifted with more delicate features than the native woman can boast as a rule. The nose was straight and narrow, the lips full, yet not of the negroid type. She was in fact a pure Ochori woman, and the Ochori are related dimly to the Arabi tribes.

"Lord, Bosambo the King has sent me to speak about women," she said simply.

"Doocidly awkward," said Bones to himself, and blushed.

"O, D'riti," he stammered, "it is true I wish to speak of women, for I make a book that all white lords will read."

"Therefore have I come," she said. "Now listen, O my lord, whilst I tell you of women, and of all they think, of their love for men and of the strange way they show it. Also of children----"

"Look here," said Bones, loudly. "I don't want any--any--private information, my child----"

Then realizing from her frown that she did not understand him, he returned to Bomongo.

"Lord, I will say what is to be said," she remarked, meekly, "for you have a gentle face and I see that your heart is very pure."

Then she began, and Bones listened with open mouth ... later he was to feel his hair rise and was to utter gurgling protests, for she spoke with primitive simplicity about things that are never spoken about at all. He tried to check her, but she was not to be checked.

"Goodness, gracious heavens!" gasped Bones.

She told him of what women think of men, and of what men _think_ women think of them, and there was a remarkable discrepancy if she spoke the truth. He asked her if she was married.

"Lord," she said at last, eyeing him thoughtfully, "it is written that I shall marry one who is greater than chiefs."

"I'll bet you will, too," thought Bones, sweating.

At parting she took his hand and pressed it to her cheek.

"Lord," she said, softly, "to-morrow when the sun is nearly down, I will come again and tell you more...."

Bones left before daybreak, having all the material he wanted for his book and more.

He took his time descending the river, calling at sundry places.

At Ikan he tied up the _Zaire_ for the night, and whilst his men were carrying the wood aboard, he settled himself to put down the gist of his discoveries. In the midst of his labours came Abiboo.

"Lord," said he, "there has just come by a fast canoe the woman who spoke with you last night."

"Jumping Moses!" said Bones, turning pale, "say to this woman that I am gone----"

But the woman came round the corner of the deck-house, shyly, yet with a certain confidence.

"Lord," she said, "behold I am here, your poor slave; there are wonderful things about women which I have not told you----"

"O, D'riti!" said Bones in despair, "I know all things, and it is not lawful that you should follow me so far from your home lest evil be said of you."

He sent her to the hut of the chief's wife--M'lini-fo-bini of Ikan--with instructions that she was to be returned to her home on the following morning. Then he went back to his work, but found it strangely distasteful. He left nothing to chance the next day.

With the dawn he slipped down the river at full speed, never so much as halting till day began to fail, and he was a short day's journey from headquarters.

"Anyhow, the poor dear won't overtake me to-day," he said--only to find the "poor dear" had stowed herself away on the steamer in the night behind a pile of wood.

* * * * *

"It's very awkward," said Hamilton, and coughed.

Bones looked at his chief pathetically.

"It's doocid awkward, sir," he agreed dismally.

"You say she won't go back?"

Bones shook his head.

"She said I'm the moon and the sun an' all sorts of rotten things to her, sir," he groaned and wiped his forehead.

"Send her to me," said Hamilton.

"Be kind to her, sir," pleaded the miserable Bones. "After all, sir, the poor girl seems to be fond of me, sir--the human heart, sir--I don't know why she should take a fancy to me."

"That's what I want to know," said Hamilton, briefly; "if she _is_ mad, I'll send her to the mission hospital along the Coast."

"You've a hard and bitter heart," said Bones, sadly.

D'riti came ready to flash her anger and eloquence at Hamilton; on the verge of defiance.

"D'riti," said Hamilton, "to-morrow I send you back to your people."

"Lord, I stay with Tibbetti who loves women and is happy to talk of them. Also some day I shall be his wife, for this is foretold." She shot a tender glance at poor Bones.

"That cannot be," said Hamilton calmly, "for Tibbetti has three wives, and they are old and fierce----"

"Oh, lord!" wailed Bones.

"And they would beat you and make you carry wood and water," Hamilton said; he saw the look of apprehension steal into the girl's face. "And more than this, D'riti, the Lord Tibbetti is mad when the moon is in full, he foams at the mouth and bites, uttering awful noises."

"Oh, dirty trick!" almost sobbed Bones.

"Go, therefore, D'riti," said Hamilton, "and I will give you a piece of fine cloth, and beads of many colours."

It is a matter of history that D'riti went.

"I don't know what you think of me, sir," said Bones, humbly, "of course I couldn't get rid of her----"

"You didn't try," said Hamilton, searching his pockets for his pipe. "You could have made her drop you like a shot."

"How, sir?"

"Stuck your finger in her eye," said Hamilton, and Bones swallowed hard.

CHAPTER VII

THE STRANGER WHO WALKED BY NIGHT

Since the day when Lieutenant Francis Augustus Tibbetts rescued from the sacrificial trees the small brown baby whom he afterwards christened Henry Hamilton Bones, the interests of that young officer were to a very large extent extremely concentrated upon that absorbing problem which a famous journal once popularized, "What shall we do with our boys?"

As to the exact nature of the communications which Bones made to England upon the subject, what hairbreadth escapes and desperate adventure he detailed with that facile pen of his, who shall say?

It is unfortunate that Hamilton's sister--that innocent purveyor of home news--had no glimpse of the correspondence, and that other recipients of his confidence are not in touch with the writer of these chronicles. Whatever he wrote, with what fervour he described his wanderings in the forest no one knows, but certainly he wrote to some purpose.

"What the dickens are all these parcels that have come for you for?" demanded his superior officer, eyeing with disfavour a mountain of brown paper packages be-sealed, be-stringed, and be-stamped.

Bones, smoking his pipe, turned them over.

"I don't know for certain," he said, carefully; "but I shouldn't be surprised if they aren't clothes, dear old officer."

"Clothes?"

"For Henry," explained Bones, and cutting the string of one and tearing away its covering revealed a little mountain of snowy garments. Bones turned them over one by one.

"For Henry," he repeated; "could you tell me, sir, what these things are for?"

He held up a garment white and small and frilly.

"No, sir, I can't," said Hamilton stiffly, "unless like the ass that you are you have forgotten to mention to your friends that Henry is a gentleman child."

Bones looked up at the blue sky and scratched his chin.

"I may have called him 'her,'" he confessed.

There were, to be exact, sixteen parcels and each contained at least one such garment, and in addition a very warm shawl, "which," said Hamilton, "will be immensely useful when it snows."

With the aid of his orderly, Bones sorted out the wardrobe and the playthings (including many volumes of the Oh-look-at-the-rat-on-the-mat-where-is-the-cat? variety), and these he carried to his hut with such dignity as he could summon.

That evening, Hamilton paid his subordinate a visit. Henry, pleasingly arrayed in a pair of the misdirected garments with a large bonnet on his head, and seated on the floor of the quarters contentedly chewing Bones' watch, whilst Bones, accompanying himself with his banjo, was singing a song which was chiefly remarkable for the fact that he was ignorant of the tune and somewhat hazy concerning the words.

"Did you ever take a tum-ty up the Nile, Did you ever dumpty dupty in a camp, Or dumpty dumpty on m--m---- Or play it in a dumpty dumpty swamp."

He rose, and saluted his senior, as Hamilton came in.

"Exactly what is going to happen when Sanders comes back?" asked Hamilton, and the face of Bones fell.

"Happen, sir? I don't take you, sir--what _could_ happen--to whom, sir?"

"To Henry," said Hamilton.

Henry looked up at that moment with a seraphic smile.

"Isn't he wonderful, sir?" asked Bones in hushed ecstasy; "you won't believe what I'm going to tell you, sir--you're such a jolly old sceptic, sir--but Henry knows me--positively recognizes me! And when you remember that he's only four months old--why, it's unbelievable."

"But what will you do when Sanders comes--really, Bones, I don't know whether I ought to allow this as it is."

"If exception is taken to Henry, sir," said Bones firmly, "I resign my commission; if a gentleman is allowed to keep a dog, sir, he is surely allowed to keep a baby. Between Henry and me, sir, there is a bond stronger than steel. I may be an ass, sir, I may even be a goop, but come between me an' my child an' all my motherly instincts--if you'll pardon the paradox--all my paternal--that's the word--instincts are aroused, and I will fight like a tiger, sir----"

"What a devil you are for jaw," said Hamilton; "anyway, I've warned you. Sanders is due in a month."

"Henry will be five," murmured Bones.

"Oh, blow Henry!" said Hamilton.

Bones rose and pointed to the door.

"May I ask you, sir," he said, "not to use that language before the child? I hate to speak to you like this, sir, but I have a responsible----"

He dodged out of the open door and the loaf of bread which Hamilton had thrown struck the lintel and rolled back to Henry's eager hands.

The two men walked up and down the parade ground whilst Fa'ma, the wife of Ahmet, carried the child to her quarters where he slept.

"I'm afraid I've got to separate you from your child," said Hamilton; "there is some curious business going on in the Lombobo, and a stranger who walks by night, of which Ahmet the Spy writes somewhat confusingly."

Bones glanced round in some apprehension.

"Oblige me, old friend," he entreated, "by never speakin' of such things before Henry--I wouldn't have him scared for the world."

II

Bosambo of the Ochori was a light sleeper, the lighter because of certain stories which had reached him of a stranger who walks by night, and in the middle of the night he suddenly became wide awake, conscious that there was a man in his hut of whose coming the sentry without was ignorant.

Bosambo's hand went out stealthily for his short spear, but before he could reach it, his wrist was caught in a grip of steel, strong fingers gripped his throat, and the intruder whispered fiercely, using certain words which left the chief helpless with wonder.

"I am M'gani of the Night," said the voice with authoritative hauteur, "of me you have heard, for I am known only to chiefs; and am so high that chiefs obey and even devils go quickly from my path."

"O, M'gani, I hear you," whispered Bosambo, "how may I serve you?"

"Get me food," said the imperious stranger, "after, you shall make a bed for me in your inner room, and sit before this house that none may disturb me, for it is to my high purpose that no word shall go to M'ilitani that I stay in your territory."

"M'gani, I am your dog," said Bosambo, and stole forth from the hut like a thief to obey.

All that day he sat before his hut and even sent away the wife of his heart and the child M'sambo, that the rest of M'gani of the N'gombi should not be disturbed.

That night when darkness had come and the glowing red of hut fires grew dimmer, M'gani came from the hut.

Bosambo had sent away the guard and accompanied his guest to the end of the village.

M'gani, with only a cloak of leopard skin about him, twirling two long spears as he walked, was silent till he came to the edge of the city where he was to take farewell of his host.

"Tell me this, Bosambo, where are Sandi's spies that I may avoid them?"

And Bosambo, without hesitation, told him.

"M'gani," said he, at parting, "where do you go now? tell me that I may send cunning men to guard you, for there is a bad spirit in this land, especially amongst the people of Lombobo, because I have offended B'limi Saka, the chief."

"No soldiers do I need, O Bosambo," said the other. "Yet I tell you this that I go to quiet places to learn that which will be best for my people."

He turned to go.

"M'gani," said Bosambo, "in the day when you shall see our lord Sandi, speak to him for me saying that I am faithful, for it seems to me, so high a man are you that he will listen to your word when he will listen to none other."

"I hear," said M'gani gravely, and slipped into the shadows of the forest.

Bosambo stood for a long time staring in the direction which M'gani had taken, then walked slowly back to his hut.

In the morning came the chief of his councillors for a hut palaver.

"Bosambo," said he, in a tone of mystery, "the Walker-of-the-Night has been with us."

"Who says this?" asked Bosambo.

"Fibini, the fisherman," said the councillor, "for this he says, that having toothache, he sat in the shadow of his hut near the warm fire and saw the Walker pass through the village and with him, lord, one who was like a devil, being big and very ugly."

"Go to Fibini," said a justly annoyed Bosambo, "and beat him on the feet till he cries--for he is a liar and a spreader of alarm."

Yet Fibini had done his worst before the bastinado (an innovation of Bosambo's) had performed its silencing mission, and Ochori mothers shepherded their little flocks with greater care when the sun went down that night, for this new terror which had come to the land, this black ghost with the wildfire fame was reputed especially devilish. In a week he had become famous--so swift does news carry in the territories.

Men had seen him passing through forest paths, or speeding with incredible swiftness along the silent river. Some said that he had no boat and walked the waters, others that he flew like a bat with millions of bats behind him. One had met him face to face and had sunk to the ground before eyes "that were very hot and red and thrusting out little lightnings."

He had been seen in many places in the Ochori, in the N'gombi city, in the villages of the Akasava, but mainly his hunting ground was the narrow strip of territory which is called Lombobo.

B'limi Saka, the chief of the land, himself a believer in devils, was especially perturbed lest the Silent Walker should be a spy of Government, for he had been guilty of practices which were particularly obnoxious to the white men who were so swift to punish.

"Yet," said he to his daughter and (to the disgust of his people, who despised women) his chief councillor, "none know my heart save you, Lamalana."

Lamalana, with her man shoulders and her flat face, peered at her grizzled father sideways.

"Devils hear hearts," she said huskily, "and when they talk of killings and sacrifices are not all devils pleased? Now I tell you this, my father, that I wait for sacrifices which you swore by death you would show me."

B'limi Saka looked round fearfully. Though the ferocity of this chief was afterwards revealed, though secret places in the forest held his horrible secret killing-houses, yet he was a timid man with a certain affection of his eyes which made him dependent upon the childless widow who had been his strength for two years.

The Lombobo were the cruellest of Sanders' people; their chiefs the most treacherous. Neither akin to the N'gombi, the Isisi, the Akasava nor the Ochori, they took on the worst attributes of each race.

Seldom in open warfare did they challenge the Administration, but there was a long tale of slain and mutilated enemies who floated face downwards in the stream; of disappearance of faithful servants of Government, and of acts of cannibalism which went unidentified and unpunished.

For though all the tribes, save the Ochori, had been cannibals, yet by fire and rope, tempered with wisdom, had the Administration brought about a newer era to the upper river.

But reformation came not to the Lombobo. A word from Sanders, a carelessly expressed view, and the Lombobo people would have been swept from existence--wiped ruthlessly from the list of nations, but that was not the way of Government, which is patient and patient and patient again till in the end, by sheer heavy weight of patience, it crushes opposition to its wishes.

They called Lamalana the barren woman, the Drinker of Life, but she had at least drunken without ostentation, and if she murdered with her own large hands, or staked men and women from a sheer lust of cruelty, there were none alive to speak against her.

Outside the town of Lombobo[6] was a patch of beaten ground where no grass grew, and this place was called "wa boma," the killing ground.

[Footnote 6: The territories are invariably named after the principal city, which is sometimes, perhaps, a little misleading.--E. W.]

Here, before the white men came, sacrifices were made openly, and it was perhaps for this association and because it was, from its very openness, free from the danger of the eavesdropper, that Lamalana and her father would sit by the hour, whilst he told her the story of ancient horrors--never too horrible for the woman who swayed to and fro as she listened as one who was hypnotized.

"Lord," said she, "the Walker of the Night comes not alone to the Lombobo; all people up and down the river have seen him, and to my mind he is a sign of great fortune showing that ghosts are with us. Now, if you are very brave, we will have a killing greater than any. Is there no hole in the hill[7] which Bosambo dug for your shame? And, lord, do not the people of the Ochori say that this child M'sambo is the light of his father's life? O ko! Bosambo shall be sorry."

[Footnote 7: _See_ "The Right of Way."]

Later they walked in the forest speaking, for they had no fear of the spirits which the last slanting rays of the dying sun unlocked from the trees. And they talked and walked, and Lombobo huntsmen, returning through the wood, gave them a wide berth, for Lamalana was possessed of an eye which was notoriously evil.

"Let us go back to the city," said Lamalana, "for now I see that you are very brave and not a blind old man."

"There will be a great palaver and who knows but M'ilitani will come with his soldiers?"

She laughed loudly and hoarsely, making the silent forest ring with harsh noise.

"O ko!" she said, then laughed no more.

In the centre of the path was a man; in the half light she saw the leopard skin and the strange belt of metal about his waist.

"O Lamalana," he said softly, "laugh gently, for I have quick ears and I smell blood."

He pointed to the darkening forest path down which they had come.

"Many have been sacrificed and none heard them," he said, "this I know now. Let there be an end to killing, for I am M'gani, the Walker of the Night, and very terrible."

"Wa!" screamed Lamalana, and leapt at him with clawing hands and her white teeth agrin. Then something soft and damp struck her face--full in the mouth like a spray of water, and she fell over struggling for her breath, and rose gasping to her feet to find the Walker had gone.

III

Before Bosambo's hut Bones sat in a long and earnest conversation, and the subject of his discourse was children. For, alarmed by the ominous suggestion which Bones had put forward, that his superior should be responsible for the well-being of Henry in the absence of his foster-parent, Hamilton had yielded to the request that Henry should accompany Bones on his visit to the north.

And now, on a large rug before Bosambo and his lord, there sat two small children eyeing one another with mutual distrust.

"Lord," said Bosambo, "it is true that your lordship's child is wonderful, but I think that M'sambo is also wonderful. If your lordship will look with kind eyes he will see a certain cunning way which is strange in so young a one. Also he speaks clearly so that I understand him."

"Yet," contested Bones, "as it seems to me, Bosambo, mine is very wise, for see how he looks to me when I speak, raising his thumb."

Bones made a clucking noise with his mouth, and Henry turned frowningly, regarded his protector with cool indifference, and returned to his scrutiny of the other strange brown animal confronting him.

"Now," said Bones that night, "what of the Walker?"

"Lord, I know of him," said Bosambo, "yet I cannot speak for we are blood brothers by certain magic rites and speeches; this I know, that he is a good man as I shall testify to Sandi when he comes back to his own people."

"You sit here for Government," said Bones, "and if you don't play the game you're a jolly old rotter, Bosambo!"

"I know 'um, I no speak 'um, sah," said Bosambo, "I be good fellah, sah, no Yadasi fellah, sah--I be Peter feller, cut 'em ear some like, sah!"

"You're a naughty old humbug," said Bones, and went to bed on the _Zaire_ leaving Henry with the chief's wife....

In the dark hours before the dawn he led his Houssas across the beach, revolver in hand, but came a little too late. The surprise party had been well planned. A speared sentry lay twisting before the chief's hut, and Bosambo's face was smothered in blood. Bones took in the situation.

"Fire on the men who fly to the forest," he said, but Bosambo laid a shaking hand upon his arm.

"Lord," he said, "hold your fire, for they have taken the children, and I fear the woman my wife is stricken."

He went into the hut, Bones following.

The chief's wife had a larger hut than Bosambo's own, communicating with her lord's through a passage of wicker and clay, and the raiders had clubbed her to silence, but Bones knew enough of surgery to see that she was in no danger.

In ten minutes the fighting regiments of the Ochori were sweeping through the forest, trackers going ahead to pick up the trail.

"Let all gods hear me," sobbed Bosambo, as he ran, "and send M'gani swiftly to M'sambo my son."

IV

"Now this is very wonderful," said Lamalana, "and it seems, O my father, no matter for a small killing, but for a sacrifice such as all men may see."

It was the hour following the dawn when the world was at its sweetest, when the chattering weaver birds went in and out of their hanging nests gossiping loudly, and faint perfumes from little morning flowers gave the air an unusual delicacy.

All the Lombobo people, the warriors and the hunters, the wives and the maidens, and even the children of tender years, lined the steep slopes of the Cup of Sacrifice. For Lamalana, deaf and blind to reason, knew that her hour was short, and that with the sun would come a man terrible in his anger ... and the soldiers who eat up opposition with fire.

"O people!" she cried.

She was stripped to the waist, stood behind the Stone of Death as though it were a counter, and the two squirming infants under her hands were so much saleable stock: "Here we bring terror to all who hate us, for one of these is the heart of Bosambo and the other is more than the heart of the-man-who-stands-for-Sandi----"

"O woman!"

The intruder had passed unnoticed, almost it seemed by magic, through the throng, and now he stood in the clear space of sacrifice. And there was not one in the throng who had not heard of him with his leopard skin and his belt of brass.

He was as black as the strange Ethiopians who came sometimes to the land with the Arabi traders, his muscular arms and legs were dull in their blackness.

There was a whisper of terror--"The Walker of the Night!--" and the people fell back ... a woman screamed and fell into a fit.

"O woman," said M'gani, "deliver to me these little children who have done no evil."

Open-mouthed the half-demented daughter of B'limi Saka stared at him.

He walked forward, lifted the children in his two arms and went slowly through the people, who parted in terror at his coming.

He turned at the top of the basin to speak.

"Do no wickedness," said he; then he gently stooped to put the children on the ground, for mouthing and bellowing senseless sounds Lamalana came furiously after him, her long, crooked knife in her hand. He thrust his hand into the leopard skin as for a weapon, but before he could withdraw it, a man of Lombobo, half in terror, fell upon and threw his arms about M'gani.

"Bo'ma!" boomed the woman, and drew back her knife for the stroke....

Bones, from the edge of the clearing, jerked up the rifle he carried and fired.

* * * * *

"What man is this?" asked Bones.

Bosambo looked at the stranger.

"This is M'gani," he said, "he who walks in the night."

"The dooce it is!" said Bones, and fixing his monocle glared at the stranger.

"From whence do you come?" he asked.

"Lord, I come from the Coast," said the man, "by many strange ways, desiring to arrive at this land secretly that I might learn the heart of these people and understand." Then, in perfect English, "I don't think we've ever met before, Mr. Tibbetts--my name is Sanders."

CHAPTER VIII

A RIGHT OF WAY

The Borders of Territories may be fixed by treaty, by certain mathematical calculations, or by arbitrary proclamation. In the territories over which Sanders ruled they were governed as between tribe and tribe by custom and such natural lines of demarkation as a river or a creek supplied.

In forest land this was not possible, and there had ever been between the Ochori and the Lombobo a feud and a grievance, touched-up border fights, for hereabouts there is good hunting. Sanders had tried many methods and had hit upon the red gum border as a solution to a great difficulty. For some curious reason there were no red gum trees in the northern fringe of the forest for five miles on the Ochori side of the great wood; it was innocent of this beautiful tree and Sanders' fiat had gone forth that there should be no Ochori hunting in the red gum lands, and that settled the matter and Sanders hoped for good.

But Bosambo set himself to enlarge his borders by a single expedient. Wherever his hunters came upon a red gum tree they cut it down. B'limi Saka, the chief of the sullen Lombobo, retaliated by planting red gum saplings on the country between the forest and the river--a fact of which Bosambo was not aware until he suddenly discovered a huge wedge of red gum driven into his lawful territory. A wedge so definite as to cut off nearly a thousand square miles of his territory, for beyond this border lay the lower Ochori country.

"How may I reach my proper villages?" he asked Sanders, who had known something of the comedy which was being enacted.

"You shall have canoes at the place of the young gum trees and shall row to a place beyond them," Sanders had said. "I have given my word that the red gum lands are the territory of B'limi Saka, and since you have only your cunning to thank--Oh, cutter of trees--I cannot help you!"

Bosambo would have made short work of the young saplings, but B'limisaka established a guard not to be forced without bloodshed, and Bosambo could do no more in that way of reprisal than instruct his people to hurl insulting references to B'limisaka's as they passed the forbidden ground.

For the maddening thing was that the slip of filched territory was less than a hundred yards wide and men of the Lombobo, who went out by night to widen it, never came out alive--for Bosambo also had a guard.

Sometimes the minion spies of Government would come to headquarters with a twist of rice paper stuck in a quill, the quill inserted in the lobes of the ear in very much the same place as the ladies wore their earrings in the barbarous mid-Victorian period, and on the rice paper with the briefest introduction would be inserted, in perfect Arabic, scraps of domestic news for the information of the Government.

Sometimes news would carry from mouth to mouth and a weary man would squat before Hamilton and recite his lesson.

"Efobi of the Isisi has stolen goats, and because he is the brother of the chief's wife goes unpunished; T'mara of the Akasava has put a curse upon the wife of O'femo the headman, and she has burnt his hut; N'kema of the Ochori will not pay his tax, saying that he is no Ochori man, but a true N'gombi; Bosambo's men have beaten a woodman of B'limi Saka, because he planted trees on Ochori land; the well folk are on the edge of the N'gomb forest, building huts and singing----"

"How long do they stay?" interrupted Hamilton.

"Lord, who knows?" said the man.

"Ogibo of the Akasava has spoken evilly of his king and mightily of himself----"

"Make a note of that, Bones."

"Make a note of which, sir?"

"Ogibo--he looked like a case of sleep-sickness the last time I was in his village--go on."

"Ogibo also says that the father of his father was a great chief and was lord of all the Akasava----"

"That's sleeping sickness all right," said Hamilton bitterly. "Why the devil doesn't he wait till Sanders is back before he goes mad?"

"Drop him a line, sir," suggested Bones, "he's a remarkable feller--dash it all, sir, what the dooce is the good of bein' in charge of the district if you can't put a stop to that sort of thing?"

"What talk is there of spears in this?" asked Hamilton of the spy.

"Lord, much talk--as I know, for I serve in this district."

"Go swiftly to Ogibo, and summon him to me for a high _lakimbo_,[8]" said Hamilton; "my soldiers shall carry you in my new little ship that burns water[9]--fly pigeons to me that I may know all that happens."

[Footnote 8: Palaver.]

[Footnote 9: The motor-launch.]

"On my life," said the spy, raised his hand in salute and departed.

"These well people you were talkin' about, sir," asked Bones, "who are they?"

But Hamilton could give no satisfactory answer to such a question, and, indeed, he would have been more than ordinarily clever had he been able to.

The wild territories are filled with stubborn facts, bewildering realities, and extraordinary inconsequences. Up by the N'gombi lands lived a tribe who, for the purposes of office classification, were known as "N'gombi (Interior)," but who were neither N'gombi nor Isisi, nor of any known branch of the Bantu race, but known as "the people of the well." They had remarkable legends, sayings which they ascribed to a mythical Idoosi; also they have a song which runs:

O well in the forest! Which chiefs have digged; No common men touched the earth, But chiefs' spears and the hands of kings.

Now there is no doubt that both the sayings of Idoosi and the song of the well have come down from days of antiquity, and that Idoosi is none other than the writer of the lost book of the Bible, of whom it is written:

"Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, first and last, are they not written in the history of Nathan the prophet, and in the prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite, and in the vision of Idoo the seer?"[10]....

[Footnote 10: Chronicles II., ix. 29.]

And is not the Song of the Well identical with that brief extract from the Book of Wars of the Lord--lost to us for ever--which runs:

"Spring up, O well: sing ye unto it: The well, which the princes digged, Which the nobles of the people delved, With the sceptre ... with their staves."[11]

[Footnote 11: Numbers xxi. 17.]

Some men say that the People of the Well are one of the lost tribes, but that is an easy solution which suggests itself to the hasty-minded. Others say that they are descendants of the Babylonian races, or that they came down from Egypt when Rameses II died, and there arose a new dynasty and a Pharaoh who did not know the wise Jewish Prime Minister who ruled so wisely, who worshipped in the little temple at Karnac, and whose statue you may see in Cairo with a strange Egyptian name. We know him better as "Joseph"--he who was sold into captivity.

Whatever they were, this much is known, to the discomfort of everybody, that they were great diggers of wells, and would, on the slightest excuse, spend whole months, choosing, for some mad reason, the top of hills for their operations, delving in the earth for water, though the river was less than a hundred yards away.

Of all the interesting solutions which have been offered with the object of identifying the People of the Well, none are so interesting as that which Bones put forward at the end of Hamilton's brief sketch.

"My idea, dear old officer," he said profoundly, "that all these Johnnies are artful old niggers who've run away from their wives in Timbuctoo--and for this reason----"

"Oh, shut up!" said Hamilton.

Two nights later the bugles were ringing through the Houssa lines, and Bones, sleepy-eyed, with an armful of personal belongings, was racing for the _Zaire_, for Ogibo of the Akasava had secured a following.

II

The chief Ogibo who held the law and kept the peace for his master, the King of the Akasava, was bitten many times by the tsetse on a hunting trip into the bad lands near the Utur forest. Two years afterwards, of a sudden, he was seized with a sense of his own importance, and proclaimed himself paramount chief of the Akasava, and all the lands adjoining. And since it is against nature that any lunatic should be without his following, he had no difficulty in raising all the spears that were requisite for his immediate purpose, marched to Igili, the second most important town in the Akasava kingdom, overthrew the defensive force, destroyed the town, and leaving half his fighting regiment to hold the conquered city he moved through the forest toward the Akasava city proper. He camped in the forest, and his men spent an uncomfortable night, for a thunderstorm broke over the river, and the dark was filled with quick flashes and the heavens crashed noisily. There was still a rumbling and a growling above his head when he assembled his forces in the grey dawn, and continued his march. He had not gone half an hour before one of his headmen came racing up to where he led his force in majesty.

"Lord," said he, "do you hear no sound?"

"I hear the thunder," said Ogibo.

"Listen!" said the headman.

They halted, head bent.

"It is thunder," said Ogibo, as the rumble and moan of the distant storm came to him. Then above the grumble of the thunder came a sharper note, a sound to be expressed in the word "blong!"

"Lord," said the headman, "that is no thunder, rather is it the fire-thrower of M'ilitani."

So Ogibo in his wrath turned back to crush the insolent white men who had dared attack the garrison he had left behind to hold Igili.

Bones with a small force was pursuing him, totally unaware of the strength that Ogibo mustered. A spy brought to the chief news of the smallness of the following force.

"Now," said Ogibo, "I will show all the world how great a chief I am, for my bravery I will destroy all these soldiers that are sent against me."

He chose his ambush well--though he had need to send scampering with squeals of terror half a hundred humble aliens who were at the moment of interruption digging a foolish well on the top of the hill where Ogibo was concealing his shaking force.

Bones with his Houssas saw how the path led up a tolerably steep hill--one of the few in the country--and groaned aloud, for he hated hills.

He was half-way up at the head of his men, when Ogibo on the summit gave the order, "Boma!" said he, which means kill, and three abreast, shields locked and spears gripped stomach high, the rebels charged down the path. Bones saw them coming and slipped out his revolver. There was no room to manoeuvre his men, the path was fairly narrow, dense undergrowth masked each side.

He heard the yell, saw above the bush, which concealed the winding way, the dancing head-dresses of the attackers, and advanced his pistol arm. The rustle of bare feet on the path, a louder roar than ever--then silence.

Bones waited, a Houssa squeezed on either side of him, but the onrushing enemy did not appear, and only a faint whimper of sound reached him.

"Lord! they go back!" gasped his sergeant; and Bones saw to his amazement a little knot of men making their frantic way up the hill.

At first he suspected an ambush within an ambush, but it was unlikely; he could never be more at Ogibo's mercy than he had been.

Cautiously he felt his way up the hill path, a revolver in each hand.

He rounded a sharp corner of the path and saw....

A great square chasm yawned in the very centre of the pathway, the bushes on either side were buried under the earth which the diggers of wells had flung up, and piled one on the other, a writhing, struggling confusion of shining bodies, were Ogibo's soldiers to the number of a hundred, with a silent Ogibo undermost, wholly indifferent to his embarrassing position, for his neck was broken.

Hamilton came up in the afternoon and brought villagers to assist at the work of rescue and afterwards he interviewed the chief of the shy and timid Well-folk.

"O chief," said Hamilton, "it is an order of Sandi that you shall dig no wells near towns, and yet you have done this."

"Bless his old heart!" murmured Bones.

"Lord, I break the law," said the man, simply, "also I break all custom, for to-day, by your favour, I cross the river, I and my people. This we have never done since time was."

"Whither do you go?"

The chief of the wanderers, an old man remarkably gifted--for his beard was long and white, and reached to his waist--stuck his spear head down in the earth.

"Lord, we go to a place which is written," he said; "for Idoosi has said, 'Go forth to the natives at war, they that fight by the river; on the swift water shall you go, even against the water'--many times have we come to the river, master, but ever have we turned back; but now it seems that the prophecy has been fulfilled, for there are bleeding men in these holes and the sound of thunders."

The People of the Well crossed to the Isisi, using the canoes of the Akasava headmen, and made a slow progress through territory which gave them no opportunity of exercising their hobby, since water lay less than a spade's length beneath the driest ground.

"Poor old Sanders," said Hamilton ruefully, when he was again on the _Zaire_, "I've so mixed up his people that he'll have to get a new map made to find them again."

"You might tell me off to show him round, sir," suggested Bones, but Hamilton did not jump at the offer.

He was getting more than a little rattled. Sanders was due back in a month, and it seemed that scarcely a week passed but some complication arose that further entangled a situation which was already too full of loose and straying threads for his liking.

"I suppose the country is settled for a week at any rate," he said with a little sigh of relief--but he reckoned without his People of the Well.

They moved, a straggling body of men and women, with their stiff walk and their doleful song, a wild people with strange, pinched faces and long black hair, along the river's edge.

A week's journeyings brought them to the Ochori country and to Bosambo, who was holding a most important palaver.

It was held on Ochori territory, for the forbidden strip was by this time so thickly planted with young trees that there was no place for a man to sit.

"Lord," said Bosambo, "if you will return me the land which you have stolen, so that I may pass unhindered from one part of my territory to the other, I will give you many islands on the river."

"That is a foolish palaver," said B'limisaka; "for you have no islands to give."

"Now I tell you, B'limisaka," said Bosambo, "my young men are crying out against you, for, as you know, you have planted your trees on the high ground, and my people, taking to their canoes, must climb down to the water's edge a long way, so that it wearies their legs, soon, I fear, I shall not hold them, for they are very fierce and full of arrogance."

"Lord," said B'limisaka, significantly, "my young men are also fierce."

The palaver was dispersing, and the last of the Lombobo councillors were disappearing in the forest, when the Diggers of the Well came through the forbidden territory to the place where Bosambo sat.

"We are they of whom you have heard, O my Lord," said the old man, who led them, "also we carry a book for you."

He unwound the cloth about his thin middle, and with many fumblings produced a paper which Bosambo read.

"From M'ilitani, by Ogibo's village in the Akasava.

"To Bosambo--may God preserve him!

"I give this to the chief of Well diggers that you shall know they are favoured by me, being simple people and very timid. Give them a passage through your territory, for they seek a holy land, and find them high places for the digging of holes, for they seek truth. Now peace on your house, Bosambo."

"On my ship, by channel of rocks."

"Lord, it is true," said the old chief, "we seek a shining thing that will stay white when it is white, and black when it is black, and the wise Idoosi has said, 'Go down into the earth for truth, seek it in the deeps of the earth, for it lies in secret places, in centre of the world it lies.'"

Bosambo thought long and rapidly, then there came to him the bright light of an inspiration.

"What manner of holes do you dig, old man?"

"Lord, we dig them deep, for we are cunning workers, and do not fear death as common men do; also we dig them straightly--into the very heart of hills we dig them."

Bosambo looked at the sloping ground covered with hateful gum.

"Old man," said he softly, "here shall you dig, you and your people, for in the heart of this hill is such a truth as you desire--my young men shall bring you food and build huts for you, and I will place one who is cunning in the way of hills to show you the way."

The old man's eyes gleamed joyously, and he clasped the ankles of his magnanimous host.

"Lord," said he humbly, "now is the prophecy fulfilled, for it was said by the great Idoosi, 'You shall come to a land where the barbarian rules, and he shall be to you as a brother!'"

"Nigger," said Bosambo in his vile English--yet with a certain hauteur, "you shall dig 'um tunnel--you no cheek 'um, no chat 'um, you lib for dear tunnel one time."

He watched them as, singing the song of the well, they went to work, women, men, and even little children undermining the Chief B'limisaka's territory and creating for Bosambo the right of way for which his soul craved.

CHAPTER IX

THE GREEN CROCODILE

_Cala cala_, as they say, seven brothers lived near the creek of the Green One. It was not called the creek of the Green One in those far-off days, for the monstrous thing had no existence.

And the seven brothers had seven wives who were sisters, and it would appear from the legend that these seven wives were unfaithful to their husbands, and upon a certain night in the full of the moon, the brothers returning from an expedition into the forest, discovered the extent of their infamy, and they tied the sisters together, the wrists of one to the ankles of the other, and they led them to the stream, and no sooner had they disappeared beneath the black waters than there was almighty splashing and bubbling of water, and there came crawling from the place where the unfaithful wives had sunk so terrible a monster that the seven brothers fled in fear.

This was the Green One, with his long ugly snout, cold, vicious eyes, and his great clawed feet. Some say that these women had been changed by magic into the Crocodile of the Pool, and many people believe this and speak of the Green One in the plural.

Certain it is, that this terrible crocodile lived through the ages--none hunting her, she was left in indisputable possession of the flat sand-bank wherein to lay her eggs, and ranged the sandy shore of the creek undisturbed.

She was regarded with awe; sacrifices, living and dead, were offered to her from time to time, and sometimes a cripple or two was knocked on the head and left by the water's edge for her pleasure. She was indeed a veritable scavenger of crime for the neighbouring villages about, and earned some sort of respect, for, as the saying went:

"Sandi does not speak the language of the Green One."

Sometimes M'zooba would go afield, leaving the quietude of the creek and the pool, which was her own territory, for the more adventurous life of the river, and here one day she lay, the whole of her body submerged and only her wicked eyes within an eighth of an inch of the water's surface, when a timorous young roebuck came picking a cautious way through the forest across the open plantations to the water's edge. He stopped from time to time apprehensively, trembling in every limb at the slightest sound, looking this way and that, then taking a few more steps and again searching the cruel world for danger before he reached the water's edge.

Then, after a final look round, he lowered his soft muzzle to the cool waters. Swift as lightning the Green One flashed her long snout out of the water, and gripped the tender head of the buck. Ruthlessly she pulled, dragging the struggling deer after her till first its neck and then its shoulders, then finally the last frantic waving stump of its white tail went under the dark waters.

Out in midstream a white little boat was moving steadily up the river and on the awning-shaded bridge an indignant young man witnessed the tragedy. The Green One had her larder under a large shelving rock half a dozen feet beneath the water. Into this cavity her long hard nose flung her dead victim, and her four powerful hands covered the entrance to the water cave with sand and rock. More than satisfied with her morning's work, the Green One came to the surface of the water to bask in the glowing warmth of the morning sunlight.

She took a survey upon the world, made up of low-lying shores and a hot blue sky. She saw a river, broad and oily, and a strange white object which she had seen often before smoking towards her.

And that was the last thing she ever saw; for Bones, on the bridge of the _Zaire_, squinted along the sights of his Express and pressed the trigger. Struck in the head by an explosive bullet, the Green One went out in a flurry of stormy water.

"Thus perish all rotten old crocodiles," said Bones, immensely pleased with himself, and he placed the rifle on the rack.

"What the devil are you shooting at, so early in the morning?" asked Hamilton.

He came out in his pyjamas, sun helmet on his head, pliant mosquito boots reaching to his knees.

"A crocodile, sir," said Bones.

"Why waste good ammunition on crocodiles?" asked Hamilton; "was it something exceptional?"

"A tremendous chap, sir," said the enthusiastic Bones, "some fifty feet long, and as green as----"

"As green!" repeated Hamilton quickly, "where are we?"

He looked with a swift glance along the shore for landmarks.

"I hope to goodness you have not shot old M'zooba," he said.

"I don't know your friend by name," said Bones, "but why shouldn't I shoot him?"

"Because, you silly ass," said Hamilton, "she is a sort of sacred crocodile."

"She was never so sacred as she is now, sir, for:

"She's flapping her wings in the crocodile heaven," said Bones, flippantly; "for I'm one of those dead shots--once I draw a bead on an animal----"

"Get out a canoe and set the woodmen to dive for the Green One," said Hamilton to his orderly, for a shot crocodile invariably sinks to the bottom and can only be recovered by diving.

They brought it to the surface, and Hamilton groaned.

"It is M'zooba," he said in resigned exasperation. "Oh, Bones, what an ass you are!"

Bones said nothing, but walked to the stern of the ship and lowered the blue ensign to half-mast--a piece of impertinence which Hamilton did not discover till a long time afterwards.

Now whatever might be the desire or wish of Hamilton, and however much he might on ordinary occasions depend upon the loyalty of his warders and his men, in this matter of the green crocodile he was entirely at their mercy, for he could not call them together asking them to speak no death of the Green One without magnifying the importance of Lieutenant Tibbetts' rash act. The only attitude he could adopt was to treat the Green One and her untimely end as something which was in the day's work neither to be lamented nor acclaimed, and when, at the first village, a doleful deputation, comprising a worried chief and a sulky witch doctor, called upon him to bemoan the tragedy, he treated the matter with great joviality.

"For what is a crocodile more or less in this river?" he asked.

"Lord, this was no crocodile," said the witch doctor, "but a very reverend ghost, and it has been our Ju-ju for many years, bringing us good crops and fair weather for our goodness, and has eaten up all the devils and sickness which came to our villages. Now it is gone nothing but ill fortune can come to us."

"Bugobo," said Hamilton, "you talk like a foolish one, for how may a crocodile who does not leave the water, and moreover is evil and old, a stealer of women and children and dangerous to your goats, how can this thing bring good fortune to any people?"

"How can the river run, lord?" replied the man, "and yet it does."

Hamilton thought for a moment.

"Now I tell you this, and you shall say to all people who ask you, that by my magic I will bring another green one to this stream, greater and larger than the one who has gone, and she shall be ju-ju for all men."

"And now," he said to Bones, when the deputation had left, "it is up to you to go out and find a nice, respectable crocodile to take the place of the lady you have so light-heartedly destroyed."

Bones gasped.

"Dear old feller," he said feebly, "the habits and customs of fauna of this land are entirely beyond me. I will fetch you a crocodile, sir, with the greatest of pleasure, although as far as I know there is nothing laid down in the King's regulations of the warrants for pay and promotion defining the catching of crocodiles as part of an officer's duty."

Hamilton made no further move towards replacing the lost Spirit of the Pool until he learnt that his offer had been taken very seriously, and that the coming of the great new Green One to the pool, was a subject of discussion up and down the river.

Now here is a fact which official records go to substantiate. Although the "Reports of the Territories" take no cognizance of ghosts and spirits and other occult influence, dealing rather with such mundane facts as the condition of crops and the discipline of the races, yet the reports of that particular year in this one district made gloomy reading both for Hamilton and for the Administrator in his far-off stone house.

Though the crops throughout the whole of the country were good that Hamilton was apprehensive about the consequences--for men fight better with a full larder behind them--yet in this immediate neighbourhood of the pool, within its sphere of influence, so to speak, the crops failed miserably, and the fish which haunt the shallow stream beneath the big stream near the channel took it into their silly heads to migrate to other distant waters. Here, then, was the consequence of Bones' murder demonstrated to a most alarming extent. There was a blight in the potatoes; the maize crop, for some unaccountable reason, was a meagre one; there were three unexpected cases of sleeping sickness followed by madness in an interior village, and, crowning disaster of all, one of those sudden storms which sweep across the river came upon the village, and lightning struck the huts.

"My son," said Hamilton, when they brought the news to him, "you have got to go out and find a green crocodile, quick."

So Bones went up the river with the naphtha launch, leaving to Hamilton the delicate task of finding a natural explanation for all the horrors which had come upon the unfortunate people.

Green crocodiles are rare even on the great river which had half a million other kinds of crocodiles to its credit, for green is both a sign of age, and by common report indicative of cannibalistic tendencies.

In whatever veneration the Green One of the Pool might be held, such respect did not extend to other parts of the river, where the green ones were sought out and slain in their early youth. Bones spent an exciting seven days chasing, lassoing and, at tunes in self-defence, shooting at great reptiles without getting any nearer to the object of his search.

"Ahmet," said he, in despair, "it seems that there are no green crocodiles on this river."

"Lord, there are very few," admitted the man; "for the people kill green crocodiles owing to their evil influence."

At every village there was news for Bones which lightened his heart. Some one had seen such a monster, it lived in a pool or lorded some creek, generally only get-at-able in a canoe; and here Bones, with his Houssas, would wait smoking furiously, with baited lines cunningly laid from thick underbrush or some tethered goat, bleating invitingly on the banks. But never once did the hunter catch so much as a glimpse of green. There were yellow crocodiles, grey crocodiles, crocodiles the colour of the sand, or the dark brown bed of the river, but nothing which by any stretch of imagination could be called green.

And urgent messages came to Bones. The _Zaire_ itself, in charge of Abiboo, came steaming up carrying a letter filled with unnecessary abuse, for Hamilton was getting rattled by the extraordinary manifestations which he received every day of the potency of this slain monster. Bones sent the sergeant back in the launch with an insubordinate message, and commandeered the _Zaire_ with her superior accommodation for himself.

"There is only one thing to do," he said, "and that is to consult jolly old Bosambo."

So he put the head of the _Zaire_ to the Ochori country, and on the second day arrived at the city.

"Lord," said Bosambo, loftily, "crocodiles I have by thousands."

"Green ones?" asked Bones anxiously.

"Lord, of every colour," said Bosambo, "blue or green or red, even golden crocodiles have I in my splendid river. But they will cost great money because they are very cunning, and my hunters of crocodiles are independent men who do not care to work."

Bones dried up the flood of eloquence quickly.

"O Bosambo," said he, "there is no money for this palaver, but a green crocodile I must have because the evil people of the Lower Isisi say I have put a spell on their land because I slew the Green One, M'zooba, also this crocodile must I have before the moon is due. My Lord M'ilitani has sent me many powerful messages to this effect."

This was another matter, and Bosambo looked dubious.

"Lord," said he, "what manner of green was this crocodile, for I never saw it?"

Bones looked round.

Neither the green of the trees he saw, nor the green of the grass underfoot, nor the green of the elephant grass growing strongly on the river's edge, nor the tender green of the high trees above, nor the tender green of the young Isisi palms; and yet the exact shade of green it was necessary to secure. He ransacked all his books, turned over all his possessions and Hamilton's too, in an endeavour to match the crocodile. There was a suit of pyjamas of Hamilton's which had a stripe very near, but not quite.

"O Ahmet," said Bones at last in desperation, "go to the storeman, and let him bring all the paints he has so that I may show Bosambo a certain colour."

They found the exact shade at last on a ten-pound tin of Aspinall enamels, and Bosambo thought long.

"Lord," said he, "I think I know where I may find just such a crocodile as you want."

Late that night Bones met Bosambo before his hut in a long and earnest palaver, and an hour before dawn he went out with Bosambo and his huntsmen, and was pulled to a certain creek in the Ochori land which is notorious for the size and strength of its crocodiles.

II

No doubt but Hamilton had a serious task before him, for although the grievance which he had to allay was limited to the restricted area over which the spirit of M'zooba brooded, yet the people of the crocodile had many sympathizers who resented as bitterly as the affected parties this interference with what Downing Street called "local religious customs."

A wholly unauthorized palaver was held in the forest which was attended by delegations from the Akasava and the N'gombi, and spies brought the news to Hamilton that the little witch doctors were going through the villages carrying stories of desolation which had come as the result of M'zooba's death.

The palaver Hamilton dispensed with some brusqueness. Twenty soldiers and a machine gun were uninvited guests to the gathering, and the meeting retired in disorder. Two of the witch doctors Hamilton's men caught. One he flogged with all the village looking on, and the other he sent to the Village of Irons for twelve months.

And all the time he spoke of the newer green one which was coming, which his magic would invoke, and which would surely appear "tied by one leg" to a stake near the pool, for all men to see.

He founded a sect of new-green-one worshippers (quite unwittingly). It needed only the corporeal presence of his novel deity to wipe out the feelings of distrust which violence had not wholly dispelled.

Day after day passed, but no word came from Bones, and Captain Hamilton cursed his subordinate, his subordinate's relations, and all the cruelty of fate which brought Bones into his command. Then, unexpectantly, the truant arrived, arrived proud and triumphant in the early morning before Hamilton was awake. He sneaked into the village so quietly that even the Houssa sentry who dozed across the threshold of Hamilton's hut was not aware of his return; and silently, with fiercely whispered injunctions, so that the surprise should be all the more complete, Bones landed his unruly cargo, its feet chained, his great muzzle lassoed and bound with raw hide, its powerful and damaging tail firmly fixed between two planks of wood (a special idea for which Bones was responsible). Then Lieutenant Tibbetts went to the hut of his chief and woke him.

"So here you are, are you?" said Hamilton.

"I am here," said Bones with trembling pride, so that Hamilton knew his subordinate had been successful; "according to your instructions, sir, I have captured the green crocodile. He is of monstrous size, and vastly superior to your partly-worn lady friend. Also," he said, "as per your instructions, conveyed to me in your letter dated the twenty-third instant, I have fastened same by right leg in the vicinity of the pool; at least," he corrected carefully, "he was fastened, but owing to certain technical difficulties he slipped cable, so to speak, and is wallowing in his native element."

"You are not rotting, Bones, are you?" asked Hamilton, busy with his toilet.

"Perfectly true and sound, sir, I never rot," said Bones stiffly; "give me a job of work to do, give me a task, put me upon my metal, sir, and with the assistance of jolly old Bosambo----"

"Is Bosambo in this?"

Bones hesitated.

"He assisted me very considerably, sir," he said; "but, so to speak, the main idea was mine."

The chief's drum summoned the villages to the palaver house, but the news had already filtered through the little township, and a crowd had gathered waiting eagerly to hear the message which Hamilton had to give them.

"O people," he said, addressing them from the hill of palaver, "all I have promised you I have performed. Behold now in the pool--and you shall come with me to see this wonder--is one greater than M'zooba, a vast and splendid spirit which shall protect your crops and be as M'zooba was, and better than was M'zooba. All this I have done for you."

"Lord Tibbetti has done for you," prompted Bones, in a hoarse whisper.

"All this have I done for you," repeated Hamilton firmly, "because I love you."

He led the way through the broad, straggling plantation to the great pool which begins in a narrow creek leading from the river and ends in a sprawl of water to the east of the village.

The whole countryside stood about watching the still water, but nothing happened.

"Can't you whistle him and make him come up or something?" asked Hamilton.

"Sir," said an indignant Bones, "I am no crocodile tamer; willing as I am to oblige you, and clever as I am with parlour tricks, I have not yet succeeded in inducing a crocodile to come to heel after a week's acquaintance."

But native people are very patient.

They stood or squatted, watching the unmoved surface of the water for half an hour, and then suddenly there was a stir and a little gasp of pleasurable apprehension ran through the assembly.

Then slowly the new one came up. He made for a sand-bank, which showed above the water in the centre of the pool; first his snout, then his long body emerged from the water, and Hamilton gasped.

"Good heavens, Bones!" he said in a startled whisper, and his astonishment was echoed from a thousand throats.

And well might he be amazed at the spectacle which the complacent Bones had secured for him.

For this great reptile was more than green, he was a green so vivid that it put the colours of the forest to shame. A bright, glittering green and along the centre of his broad back one zig-zag splash of orange.

"Phew," whistled Hamilton, "this is something like."

The roar of approval from the people was unmistakable. The crocodile turned his evil head and for a moment, as it seemed to Bones, his eyes glinted viciously in the direction of the young and enterprising officer. And Bones admitted after to a feeling of panic.

Then with a malignant "woof!" like the hoarse, growling bark of a dog, magnified a hundred times, he slid back into the water, a great living streak of vivid green and disappeared to the cool retreat at the bottom of the pool.

"You have done splendidly, Bones, splendidly!" said Hamilton, and clapped him on the back; "really you are a most enterprising devil."

"Not at all, sir," said Bones.

He ate his dinner on the _Zaire_, answering with monosyllables the questions which Hamilton put to him regarding the quest and the place of the origin of this wonderful beast. It was after dinner when they were smoking their cigars in the gloom as the _Zaire_ was steaming across its way to the shore where a wooding offered an excuse for a night's stay, and Bones gave voice to his thoughts.

And curiously enough his conversation did not deal directly or indirectly with his discovery.

"When was this boat decorated last, sir?" he asked.

"About six months before Sanders left," replied Hamilton in surprise; "just why do you ask?"

"Nothing, sir," said Bones, and whistled light-heartedly. Then he returned to the subject.

"I only asked you because I thought the enamel work in the cabin and all that sort of thing has worn very well."

"Yes, it is good wearing stuff," said Hamilton.

"That green paint in the bathroom is rather _chic_, isn't it? Is that good wearing stuff?"

"The enamel?" smiled Hamilton. "Yes, I believe that is very good wearing. I am not a whale on domestic matters, Bones, but I should imagine that it would last for another year without showing any sign of wear."

"Is it waterproof at all?" asked Bones, after another pause.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean would it wash off if a lot of water were applied to it?"

"No, I should not imagine it would," said Hamilton, "what makes you ask?"

"Oh, nothing!" said Bones carelessly and whistled, looking up to the stars that were peeping from the sky; and the inside of Lieutenant Tibbetts was one large expansive grin.

CHAPTER X

HENRY HAMILTON BONES

Lieutenant Francis Augustus Tibbetts of the Houssas was at some disadvantage with his chief and friend. Lieutenant F. A. Tibbetts might take a perfectly correct attitude, might salute on every possible occasion that a man could salute, might click his heels together in the German fashion (he had spent a year at Heidelberg), might be stiffly formal and so greet his superior that he contrived to combine a dutiful recognition with the cut direct, but never could he overcome one fatal obstacle to marked avoidance--he had to grub with Hamilton.

Bones was hurt. Hamilton had behaved to him as no brother officer should behave. Hamilton had spoken harshly and cruelly in the matter of a commission with which he had entrusted his subordinate, and with which the aforesaid subordinate had lamentably failed to cope.

Up in the Akasava country a certain wise man named M'bisibi had predicted the coming of a devil-child who should be born on a night when the moon lay so on the river and certain rains had fallen in the forest.

And this child should be called "Ewa," which is death; and first his mother would die and then his father; and he would grow up to be a scourge to his people and a pestilence to his nation, and crops would wither when he walked past them, and the fish in the river would float belly up in stinking death, and until Ewa M'faba himself went out, nothing but ill-fortune should come to the N'gombi-Isisi.

Thus M'bisibi predicted, and the word went up and down the river, for the prophet was old and accounted wise even by Bosambo of the Ochori.

It came to Hamilton quickly enough, and he had sent Bones post-haste to await the advent of any unfortunate youngster who was tactless enough to put in an appearance at such an inauspicious moment as would fulfil the prediction of M'bisibi.

And Bones had gone to the wrong village, and that in the face of his steersman's and his sergeant's protest that he was going wrong. Fortunately, by reliable account, no child had been born in the village, and the prediction was unfulfilled.

"Otherwise," said Hamilton, "its young life would have been on your head."

"Yes, sir," said Bones.

"I didn't tell you there were two villages called Inkau," Hamilton confessed, "because I didn't realize you were chump enough to go to the wrong one."

"No, sir," agreed Bones, patiently.

"Naturally," said Hamilton, "I thought the idea of saving the lives of innocent babes would have been sufficient incentive."

"Naturally, sir," said Bones, with forced geniality.

"I've come to one conclusion about you, Bones," said Hamilton.

"Yes, sir," said Bones, "that I'm an ass, sir, I think?"

Hamilton nodded--it was too hot to speak.

"It was an interestin' conclusion," said Bones, thoughtfully, "not without originality--when it first occurred to you, but as a conclusion, if you will pardon my criticism, sir, if you will forgive me for suggestin' as much--in callin' me an ass, sir: apart from its bein' contrary to the spirit an' letter of the Army Act--God Save the King!--it's a bit low, sir." And he left his superior officer without another word. For three days they sat at breakfast, tiffin and dinner, and neither said more than:

"May I pass you the bread, sir?"

"Thank you, sir; have you the salt, sir?"

Hamilton was so busy a man that he might have forgotten the feud, but for the insistence of Bones, who never lost an opportunity of reminding his No. 1 that he was mortally hurt.

One night, dinner had reached the stage where two young officers of Houssas sat primly side by side on the verandah sipping their coffee. Neither spoke, and the sance might have ended with the conventional "Good night" and that punctilious salute which Bones invariably gave, and which Hamilton as punctiliously returned, but for the apparition of a dark figure which crossed the broad space of parade ground hesitatingly as though not certain of his way, and finally came with dragging feet through Sanders' garden to the edge of the verandah.

It was the figure of a small boy, very thin; Hamilton could see this through the half-darkness.

The boy was as naked as when he was born, and he carried in his hand a single paddle.

"O boy," said Hamilton, "I see you."

"Wanda!" said the boy in a frightened tone, and hesitated, as though he were deciding whether it would be better to bolt, or to conclude his desperate enterprise.

"Come up to me," said Hamilton, kindly.

He recognized by the dialect that the visitor had come a long way, as indeed he had, for his old canoe was pushed up amongst the elephant grass a mile away from headquarters, and he had spent three days and nights upon the river. He came up, an embarrassed and a frightened lad, and stood twiddling his toes on the unaccustomed smoothness of the big stoep.

"Where do you come from, and why have you come?" asked Hamilton.

"Lord, I have come from the village of M'bisibi," said the boy; "my mother has sent me because she fears for her life, my father being away on a great hunt. As for me," he went on, "my name is Tilimi-N'kema."

"Speak on, Tilimi the Monkey," said Hamilton, "tell me why the woman your mother fears for her life."

The boy was silent for a spell; evidently he was trying to recall the exact formula which had been dinned into his unreceptive brain, and to repeat word for word the lesson which he had learned parrotwise.

"Thus says the woman my mother," he said at last, with the blank, monotonous delivery peculiar to all small boys who have been rehearsed in speech, "on a certain day when the moon was at full and the rain was in the forest so that we all heard it in the village, my mother bore a child who is my own brother, and, lord, because she feared things which the old man M'bisibi had spoken she went into the forest to a certain witch doctor, and there the child was born. To my mind," said the lad, with a curious air of wisdom which is the property of the youthful native from whom none of the mysteries of life or death are hidden, "it is better she did this, for they would have made a sacrifice of her child. Now when she came back, and they spoke to her, she said that the boy was dead. But this is the truth, lord, that she had left this child with the witch doctor, and now----" he hesitated again.

"And now?" repeated Hamilton.

"Now, lord," said the boy, "this witch doctor, whose name is Bogolono, says she must bring him rich presents at the full of every moon, because her son and my brother is the devil-child whom M'bisibi has predicted. And if she brings no rich presents he will take the child to the village, and there will be an end."

Hamilton called his orderly.

"Give this boy some chop," he said; "to-morrow we will have a longer palaver."

He waited till the man and his charge were out of earshot, then he turned to Bones.

"Bones," he said, seriously, "I think you had better leave unobtrusively for M'bisibi's village, find the woman, and bring her to safety. You will know the village," he added, unnecessarily, "it is the one you didn't find last time."

Bones left insubordinately and made no response.

* * * * *

II

Bosambo, with his arms folded across his brawny chest, looked curiously at the deputation which had come to him.

"This is a bad palaver," said Bosambo, "for it seems to me that when little chiefs do that which is wrong, it is an ill thing; but when great kings, such as your master Iberi, stand at the back of such wrongdoings, that is the worst thing of all, and though this M'bisibi is a wise man, as we all know, and indeed the only wise man of your people, has brought out this devil-child, and makes a killing palaver, then M'ilitani will come very quickly with his soldiers and there will be an end to little chiefs and big chiefs alike."

"Lord, that will be so," said the messenger, "unless all chiefs in the land stand in brotherhood together. And because we know Sandi loves you, and M'ilitani also, and that Tibbetti himself is as tender to you as a brother, M'bisibi sent this word saying, 'Go to Bosambo, and say M'bisibi, the wise man, bids him come to a great and fearful palaver touching the matter of several devils. Tell him also that great evil will come to this land, to his land and to mine, to his wife and the wives of his counsellors, and to his children and theirs, unless we make an end to certain devils.'"

Bosambo, chin on clenched fist, looked thoughtfully at the other.

"This cannot be," said he in a troubled voice; "for though I die and all that is wonderful to me shall pass out of this world, yet I must do no thing which is unlawful in the eyes of Sandi, my master, and of the great ones he has left behind to fulfil the law. Say this to M'bisibi from me, that I think he is very wise and understands ghosts and such-like palavers. Also say that if he puts curses upon my huts I will come with my spearmen to him, and if aught follows I will hang him by the ears from a high tree, though he sleeps with ghosts and commands whole armies of devils; this palaver is finished."

The messenger carried the word back to M'bisibi and the council of the chiefs and the eldermen who sat in the palaver house, and old as he was and wise by all standards, M'bisibi shivered, for, as he explained, that which Bosambo said would he do. For this is peculiar to no race or colour, that old men love life dearer than young.

"Bogolono, you shall bring the child," he said, turning to one who sat at his side, string upon string of human teeth looped about his neck and his eyes circled with white ashes, "and it shall be sacrificed according to the custom, as it was in the days of my fathers and of their fathers."

They chose a spot in the forest, where four young trees stood at corners of a rough square. With their short bush knives they lopped the tender branches away, leaving four pliant poles that bled stickily. With great care they drew down the tops of these trees until they nearly met, cutting the heads so that there was no overlapping. To these four ends they fastened ropes, one for each arm and for each ankle of the devil child, and with other ropes they held the saplings to their place.

"Now this is the magic of it," said M'bisibi, "that when the moon is full to-night we shall sacrifice first a goat, and then a fowl, casting certain parts into the fire which shall be made of white gum, and I will make certain marks upon the child's face and upon his belly, and then I will cut these ropes so that to the four ends of the world we shall cast forth this devil, who will no longer trouble us."

That night came many chiefs, Iberi of the Akasava, Tilini of the Lesser Isisi, Efele (the Tornado) of the N'gombi, Lisu (the Seer) of the Inner Territories, but Lilongo[12] (as they called Bosambo of the Ochori), did not come.

[Footnote 12: "Lilongo" is from the noun "balongo"--blood, and means literally "he-who-breaks-blood-friendships."--E. W.]

* * * * *

III

Bones reached the village two hours before the time of sacrifice and landed a force of twenty Houssas and a small Maxim gun. The village was peaceable, and there was no sign of anything untoward. Save this. The village was given over to old people and children. M'bisibi was an hour--two hours--four hours in the forest. He had gone north--east--south--none knew whither.

The very evasiveness of the replies put Bones into a fret. He scouted the paths and found indications of people having passed over all three.

He sent his gun back to the _Zaire_, divided his party into three, and accompanied by half a dozen men, he himself took the middle path.

For an hour he trudged, losing his way, and finding it again. He came upon a further division of paths and split up his little force again.

In the end he found himself alone, struggling over the rough ground in a darkness illuminated only by the electric lamp he carried, and making for a faint gleam of red light which showed through the trees ahead.

M'bisibi held the child on his outstretched hands, a fat little child, with large, wondering eyes that stared solemnly at the dancing flames, and sucked a small brown thumb contentedly.

"Behold this child, oh chiefs and people," said M'bisibi, "who was born as I predicted, and is filled with devils!"

The baby turned his head so that his fat little neck was all rolled and creased, and said "Ah!" to the pretty fire, and chuckled.

"Even now the devils speak," said M'bisibi, "but presently you shall hear them screaming through the world because I have scattered them," and he made his way to the bowed saplings.

Bones, his face scratched and bleeding, his uniform torn in a dozen places, came swiftly after him.

"My bird, I think," said Bones, and caught the child unscientifically.

Picture Bones with a baby under his arm--a baby indignant, outraged, infernally uncomfortable, and grimacing a yell into being.

"Lord," said M'bisibi, breathing quickly, "what do you seek?"

"That which I have," said Bones, waving him off with the black muzzle of his automatic Colt. "Tomorrow you shall answer for many crimes."

He backed quickly to the cover of the woods, scenting the trouble that was coming.

He heard the old man's roar.

"O people ... this white man will loose devils upon the land!"

Then a throwing spear snicked the trunk of a tree, and another, for there were no soldiers, and this congregation of exorcisers were mad with wrath at the thought of the evil which Tibbetti was preparing for them.

"Snick!"

A spear struck Bones' boot.

"Shut your eyes, baby," said Bones, and fired into the brown. Then he ran for his life. Over roots and fallen trees he fell and stumbled, his tiny passenger yelling desperately.

"Oh, shut up!" snarled Bones, "what the dickens are you shouting about--hey? Haven't I saved your young life, you ungrateful little devil?"

Now and again he would stop to consult his illuminated compass. That the pursuit continued he knew, but he had the dubious satisfaction of knowing, too, that he had left the path and was in the forest.

Then he heard a faint shot, and another, and another, and grinned.

His pursuers had stumbled upon a party of Houssas.

From sheer exhaustion the baby had fallen asleep. Babies were confoundedly heavy--Bones had never observed the fact before, but with the strap of his sword belt he fashioned a sling that relieved him of some of the weight.

He took it easier now, for he knew M'bisibi's men would be frightened off. He rested for half an hour on the ground, and then came a snuffling leopard walking silently through the forest, betraying his presence only by the two green danger-lamps of his eyes.

Bones sat up and flourished his lamp upon the startled beast, which growled in fright, and went scampering through the forest like the great cat that he was.

The growl woke Bones' charge, and he awoke hungry and disinclined to further sleep without that inducement and comfort which his nurse was in no position to offer, whereupon Bones snuggled the whimpering child.

"He's a wicked old leopard!" he said, "to come and wake a child at this time of the night."

The knuckle of Bones' little finger soothed the baby, though it was a poor substitute for the nutriment it had every right to expect, and it whimpered itself to sleep.

Lieutenant Tibbetts looked at his compass again. He had located the shots to eastward, but he did not care to make a bee-line in that direction for fear of falling upon some of the enemy, whom he knew would be, at this time, making their way to the river.

For two hours before dawn he snatched a little sleep, and was awakened by a fierce tugging at his nose. He got up, laid the baby on the soft ground, and stood with arms akimbo, and his monocle firmly fixed, surveying his noisy companion.

"What the dooce are you making all this row about?" he asked indignantly. "Have a little patience, young feller, exercise a little _suaviter in modo_, dear old baby!"

But still the fat little morsel on the ground continued his noisy monologue, protesting in a language which is of an age rather than of a race, against the cruelty and the thoughtlessness and the distressing lack of consideration which his elder and better was showing him.

"I suppose you want some grub," said Bones, in dismay; and looked round helplessly.

He searched the pocket of his haversack, and had the good fortune to find a biscuit; his vacuum flask had just half a cup of warm tea. He fed the baby with soaked biscuit and drank the tea himself.

"You ought to have a bath or something," said Bones, severely; but it was not until an hour later that he found a forest pool in which to perform the ablution.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, as near as he could judge, for his watch had stopped, he struck a path, and would have reached the village before sundown, but for the fact that he again missed the path, and learnt of this fact about the same time he discovered he had lost his compass.

Bones looked dismally at the wide-awake child.

"Dear old companion in arms," he said, gloomily, "we are lost."

The baby's face creased in a smile.

"It's nothing to laugh about, you silly ass," said Bones.

IV

"Master, of our Lord Tibbetti I do not know," said M'bisibi sullenly.

"Yet you shall know before the sun is black," said Hamilton, "and your young men shall find him, or there is a tree for you, old man, a quick death by _Ewa_!"

"I have sought, my lord," said M'bisibi, "all my hunters have searched the forest, yet we have not found him. A certain devil-pot is here."

He fumbled under a native cloth and drew forth Bones' compass.

"This only could we find on the forest path that leads to Inilaki."

"And the child is with him?"

"So men say," said M'bisibi, "though by my magic I know that the child will die, for how can a white man who knows nothing of little children give him life and comfort? Yet," he amended carefully, since it was necessary to preserve the character of the intended victim, "if this child is indeed a devil child, as I believe, he will lead my lord Tibbetti to terrible places and return himself unharmed."

"He will lead you to a place more terrible," said M'ilitani, significantly, and sent a nimble climber into the trees to fasten a block and tackle to a stout branch, and thread a rope through.

It was so effective that M'bisibi, an old man, became most energetically active. _Lokali_ and swift messengers sent his villages to the search. Every half-hour the Hotchkiss gun of the _Zaire_ banged noisily; and Hamilton, tramping through the woods, felt his heart sink as hour after hour passed without news of his comrade.

"I tell you this, lord," said the headman, who accompanied him, "that I think Tibbetti is dead and the child also. For this wood is filled with ghosts and savage beasts, also many strong and poisonous snakes. See, lord!" He pointed.

They had reached a clearing where the grass was rich and luxuriant, where overshadowing branches formed an idealic bower, where heavy white waxen flowers were looped from branch to branch holding the green boughs in their parasitical clutch. Hamilton followed the direction of his eyes. In the middle of the clearing a long, sinuous shape, dark brown, and violently coloured with patches of green and vermillion, that was swaying backward and forward, hissing angrily at some object before it.

"Good God!" said Hamilton, and dropped his hand on his revolver, but before it was clear of his holster, there came a sharp crack, and the snake leapt up and fell back as a bullet went snip-snapping through the undergrowth. Then Hamilton saw Bones. Bones in his shirtsleeves, bareheaded, his big pipe in his mouth, who came hurriedly through the trees pistol in hand.

"Naughty boy!" he said, reproachfully, and stooping, picked up a squalling brown object from the ground. "Didn't Daddy tell you not to go near those horrid snakes? Daddy spank you----"

Then he caught sight of the amazed Hamilton, clutched the baby in one hand, and saluted with the other.

"Baby present and correct, sir," he said, formally.

* * * * *

"What are you going to do with it?" asked Hamilton, after Bones had indulged in the luxury of a bath and had his dinner.

"Do with what, sir?" asked Bones.

"With this?"

Hamilton pointed to a crawling morsel who was at that moment looking up to Bones for approval.

"What do you expect me to do, sir?" asked Bones, stiffly; "the mother is dead and he has no father. I feel a certain amount of responsibility about Henry."

"And who the dickens is Henry?" asked Hamilton.

Bones indicated the child with a fine gesture.

"Henry Hamilton Bones, sir," he said grandly. "The child of the regiment," he went on; "adopted by me to be a prop for my declining years, sir."

"Heaven and earth!" said Hamilton, breathlessly.

He went aft to recover his nerve, and returned to become an unseen spectator to a purely domestic scene, for Bones had immersed the squalling infant in his own india-rubber bath, and was gingerly cleaning him with a mop.

CHAPTER XI

BONES AT M'FA

Hamilton of the Houssas coming down to headquarters met Bosambo by appointment at the junction of the rivers.

"O Bosambo," said Hamilton, "I have sent for you to make a _likambo_ because of certain things which my other eyes have seen and my other ears have heard."

To some men this hint of report from the spies of Government might bring dismay and apprehension, but to Bosambo, whose conscience was clear, they awakened only curiosity.

"Lord, I am your eyes in the Ochori," he said with truth, "and God knows I report faithfully."

Hamilton nodded. He was yellow with fever, and the hand that filled the briar pipe shook with ague. All this Bosambo saw.

"It is not of you I speak, nor of your people, but of the Akasava and the N'gombi and the evil little men who live in the forest--now is it true that they speak mockingly of my lord Tibbetti?"

Bosambo hesitated.

"Lord," said he, "what dogs are they, that they should speak of the mighty? Yet I will not lie to you, M'ilitani: they mock Tibbetti, because he is young and his heart is pure."

Hamilton nodded again, and stuck out his jaw in troubled meditation.

"I am a sick man," he said, "and I must rest, sending Tibbetti to watch the river, because the crops are good and there is fish for all men, and because the people are prosperous, for, Bosambo, in such times there is much boastfulness, and the tribes are ripe for foolish deeds deserving to appear wonderful in the eyes of woman."

"All this I know, M'ilitani," said Bosambo, "and because you are sick, my heart and my stomach are sore. For though I do not love you as I love Sandi, who is more clever than you, yet I love you well enough to grieve. And Tibbetti also----"

He paused.

"He is young," said Hamilton, "and not yet grown to himself--now you, Bosambo, shall check men who are insolent to his face, and be to him as a strong right hand."

"On my head and my life," said Bosambo, "yet, lord M'ilitani, I think that his day will find him, for it is written in the Sura of the Djin that all men are born three times, and the day will come when Bonzi will be born again."

He was in his canoe before Hamilton realized what he had said.

"Tell me, Bosambo," said he, leaning over the side of the _Zaire_, "what name did you call my lord Tibbetti?"

"Bonzi," said Bosambo, innocently, "for such I have heard you call him."

"Oh, dog of a thief!" stormed Hamilton. "If you speak without respect of Tibbetti, I will break your head."

Bosambo looked up with a glint in his big, black eyes.

"Lord," he said, softly, "it is said on the river 'speak only the words which high ones speak, and you can say no wrong,' and if you, who are wiser than any, call my lord 'Bonzi'--what goat am I that I should not call him 'Bonzi' also?"

Hamilton saw the canoe drift round, saw the flashing paddles dip regularly, and the chant of the Ochori boat song came fainter and fainter as Bosambo's state canoe began its long journey northward.

Hamilton reached headquarters with a temperature of 105, and declined Bones' well-meant offers to look after him.

"What you want, dear old officer," said Bones, fussing around, "is careful nursin'. Trust old Bones and he'll pull you back to health, sir. Keep up your pecker, sir, an' I'll bring you back so to speak from the valley of the shadow--go to bed an' I'll have a mustard plaster on your chest in half a jiffy."

"If you come anywhere near me with a mustard plaster," said Hamilton, pardonably annoyed, "I'll brain you!"

"Don't you think!" asked Bones anxiously, "that you ought to put your feet in mustard and water, sir--awfully good tonic for a feller, sir. Bucks you up an' all that sort of thing, sir; uncle of mine who used to take too much to drink----"

"The only chance for me," said Hamilton, "is for you to clear out and leave me alone. Bones--quit fooling: I'm a sick man, and you've any amount of responsibility. Go up to the Isisi and watch things--it's pretty hard to say this to you, but I'm in your hands."

Bones said nothing.

He looked down at the fever-stricken man and thrust his hands in his pockets.

"You see, old Bones," said Hamilton, and now his friend heard the weariness and the weakness in his voice, "Sanders has a hold on these chaps that I haven't quite got ... and ... and ... well, you haven't got at all. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but you're young, Bones, and these devils know how amiable you are."

"I'm an ass, sir," muttered Bones, shakily, "an' somehow I understand that this is the time in my jolly old career when I oughtn't to be an ass.... I'm sorry, sir."

Hamilton smiled up at him.

"It isn't for Sanders' sake or mine or your own, Bones--but for--well, for the whole crowd of us--white folk. You'll have to do your best, old man."

Bones took the other's hand, snivelled a bit despite his fierce effort of restraint, and went aboard the _Zaire_.

* * * * *

"Tell all men," said B'chumbiri, addressing his impassive relatives, "that I go to a great day and to many strange lands."

He was tall and knobby-kneed, spoke with a squeak at the end of his deeper sentences, and about his tired eyes he had made a red circle with camwood. Round his head he had twisted a wire so tightly that it all but cut the flesh: this was necessary, for B'chumbiri had a headache which never left him day or night.

Now he stood, his lank body wrapped in a blanket, and he looked with dull eyes from face to face.

"I see you," he said at last, and repeated his motto which had something to do with monkeys.

They watched him go down the street towards the beech where the easiest canoe in the village was moored.

"It is better if we go after him and put out his eyes," said his elder brother; "else who knows what damage he will do for which we must pay?"

Only B'chumbiri's mother looked after him with a mouth that drooped at the side, for he was her only son, all the others being by other wives of Mochimo.

His father and his uncle stood apart and whispered, and presently when, with a great waving of arms, B'chumbiri had embarked, they went out of the village by the forest path and ran tirelessly till they struck the river at its bend.

"Here we will wait," panted the uncle, "and when B'chumbiri comes we will call him to land, for he has the sickness _mongo_."

"What of Sandi?" asked the father, who was no gossip.

"Sandi is gone," replied the other, "and there is no law."

Presently B'chumbiri came sweeping round the bend, singing in his poor, cracked voice about a land and a people and treasures ... he turned his canoe at his father's bidding, and came obediently to land....

Overhead the sky was a vivid blue, and the water which moved quickly between the rocky channel of the Lower Isisi caught something of the blue, though the thick green of elephant grass by the water's edge and the overhanging spread of gum trees took away from the clarity of reflection.

There was, too, a gentle breeze and a pleasing absence of flies, so that a man might get under the red and white striped awning of the _Zaire_ and think or read or dream dreams, and find life a pleasant experience, and something to be thankful for.

Such a day does not often come upon the river, but if it does, the deep channel of the Isisi focuses all the joy of it. Here the river runs as straight as a canal for six miles, the current swifter and stronger between the guiding banks than elsewhere. There are rocks, charted and known, for the bed of the river undergoes no change, the swift waters carry no sands to choke the fairway, navigation is largely a matter of engine power and rule of thumb. Going slowly up stream a little more than two knots an hour, the _Zaire_ was for once a pleasure steamer. Her long-barrelled Hotchkiss guns were hidden in their canvas jackets, the Maxims were lashed to the side of the bridge out of sight, and Lieutenant Augustus Tibbetts, who sprawled in a big wicker-work chair with an illustrated paper on his knees, a nasal-toned phonograph at his feet, and a long glass of lemon squash at his elbow, had little to do but pass the pleasant hours in the most pleasant occupation he could conceive, which was the posting of a diary, which he hoped on some future occasion to publish.

A shout, quick and sharp, brought him to his feet, a stiffly outstretched hand pointed to the waters.

"What the dooce----" demanded Bones indignantly, and looked over the side.... He saw the pitiful thing that rolled slowly in the swift current, and the homely face of Bones hardened.

"Damn," he said, and the wheel of the _Zaire_ spun, and the little boat came broadside to the stream before the threshing wheel got purchase on the water.

It was Bones' sinewy hand that gripped the poor arm and brought the body to the side of the canoe into which he had jumped as the boat came round.

"Um," said Bones, seeing what he saw; "who knows this man?"

"Lord," said a wooding man, "this is B'chumbiri who was mad, and he lived in the village near by."

"There will we go," said Bones, very gravely.

Now all the people of M'fa knew that the father of B'chumbiri and his uncle had put away the tiresome youth with his headache and his silly talk, and when there came news that the _Zaire_ was beating her way to the village there was a hasty _likambo_ of the eldermen.

"Since this is neither Sandi nor M'ilitani who comes," said the chief, an old man, N'jela ("the Bringer"), "but Moon-in-the-Eye, who is a child, let us say that B'chumbiri fell into the water so that the crocodiles had him, and if he asks us who slew B'chumbiri--for it may be that he knows--let none speak, and afterwards we will tell M'ilitani that we did not understand him."

With this arrangement all agreed; for surely here was a palaver not to be feared.

Bones came with his escort of Houssas.

From the dark interiors of thatched huts men and women watched his thin figure going up the street, and laughed.

Nor did they laugh softly. Bones heard the chuckles of unseen people, divined that contempt, and his lips trembled. He felt an immense loneliness--all the weight of government was pressed down upon his head, it overwhelmed, it smothered him.

Yet he kept a tight hold upon himself, and by a supreme effort of will showed no sign of his perturbation.

The palaver was of little value to Bones; the village was blandly innocent of murder or knowledge of murder. More than this, all men stoutly swore that the thing that lay upon the foreshore for identification, surrounded by a crowd of frowning and frightened little boys lured by the very gruesomeness of the spectacle, was unknown, and laughed openly at the suggestion that it was B'chumbiri, who (said they) had gone a Journey into the forest.

There was little short of open mockery and defiance when they pointed out certain indications that went to prove that this man was not of the Akasava, but of the higher Isisi.

So Bones' visit was fruitless.

He dismissed the palaver and walked back to his ship, and worked the river, village by village, with no more satisfactory result. That night in the little town of M'fa there was a dance and a jubilation to celebrate the cunning of a people who had outwitted and overawed the lords of the land, but the next day came Bosambo, who had established a system of espionage more far-reaching, and possibly more effective, than the service which the Government had instituted.

Liberties they might take with Bones; but they sat discomforted in palaver before this alien chief, swathed in monkey tails, his shield in one hand, and his bunch of spears in the other.

"All things I know," said Bosambo, when they told him what they had to tell, "and it has come to me that you have spoken lightly of Tibbetti, who is my friend and my master, and is well beloved of Sandi. Also they tell me that you smiled at him. Now I tell you there will come a day when you will not smile, and that day is near at hand."

"Lord," said the chief, "he made with us a foolish palaver, believing that we had put away B'chumbiri."

"And he shall return to that foolish palaver," said Bosambo grimly, "and if he goes away unsatisfied, behold I will come, and I will take your old men, and I will hang them by hooks into a tree and roast their feet. For if there is no Sandi and no law, behold I am Sandi and I law, doing the will of a certain bearded king, Togi-tani."

He left the village of M'fa a little unhappy for the space of a day, when, native-like, they forgot all that he had said.

In the meantime, up and down the river went Bones, palavers which lasted from sunrise to sunset being his portion.

He had in his mind one vital fact, that for the honour of his race and for the credit of his administration he must bring to justice the man who slew the thing which he had found in the river. Chiefs and elders met him with scarcely concealed scorn, and waited expectantly to hear his strong, foreign language. But in this they were disappointed, for Bones spoke nothing but the language of the river, and little of it.

He went on board the _Zaire_ on the ninth night after his discovery, dispirited and sick at heart.

"It seems to me, Ahmet," he said to the Houssa sergeant who stood waiting silently by the table where his meagre dinner was laid, "that no man speaks the truth in this cursed land, and that they do not fear me as they fear Sandi."

"Lord, it is so," said Ahmet; "for, as your lordship knows, Sandi was very terrible, and then, O Tibbetti, he is an older man, very wise in the ways of these people, and very cunning to see their heart. All great trees grow slowly, O my lord! and that which springs up in a night dies in a day."

Bones pondered this for a while, then:

"Wake me at dawn," he said. "I go back to M'fa for the last palaver, and if this palaver be a bad one, be sure you shall not see my face again upon the river."

Bones spoke truly, his resignation, written in his sprawling hand, lay enveloped and sealed in his cabin ready for dispatch. He stopped his steamer at a village six miles from M'fa, and sent a party of Houssas to the village with a message.

The chief was to summon all eldermen, and all men responsible to the Government, the wearers of medals and the holders of rights, all landmen and leaders of hunters, the captains of spears, and the first headmen. Even to the witch doctors he called together.

"O soldier!" said the chief, dubiously, "what happens to me if I do not obey his commands? For my men are weary, having hunted in the forest, and my chiefs do not like long palavers concerning law."

"That may be," said Ahmet, calmly. "But when my lord calls you to palaver you must obey, otherwise I take you, I and my strong men, to the Village of Irons, there to rest for a while to my lord's pleasure."

So the chief sent messengers and rattled his _lokali_ to some purpose, bringing headmen and witch doctors, little and great chiefs, and spearmen of quality, to squat about the palaver house on the little hill to the east of the village.

Bones came with an escort of four men. He walked slowly up the cut steps in the hillside and sat upon the stool to the chief's right; and no sooner had he seated himself than, without preliminary, he began to speak. And he spoke of Sanders, of his splendour and his power; of his love for all people and his land, and also M'ilitani, who these men respected because of his devilish blue eyes.

At first he spoke slowly, because he found a difficulty in breathing, and then as he found himself, grew more and more lucid and took a larger grasp of the language.

"Now," said he, "I come to you, being young in the service of the Government, and unworthy to tread in my lord Sandi's way. Yet I hold the laws in my two hands even as Sandi held them, for laws do not change with men, neither does the sun change whatever be the land upon which it shines. Now, I say to you and to all men, deliver to me the slayer of B'chumbiri that I may deal with him according to the law."

There was a dead silence, and Bones waited.

Then the silence grew into a whisper, from a whisper into a babble of suppressed talk, and finally somebody laughed. Bones stood up, for this was his supreme moment.

"Come out to me, O killer!" he said softly, "for who am I that I can injure you? Did I not hear some voice say _g'la_, and is not _g'la_ the name of a fool? O, wise and brave men of the Akasava who sit there quietly, daring not so much as to hit a finger before one who is a fool!"

Again the silence fell. Bones, his helmet on the back of his head, his hands thrust into his pockets, came a little way down the hill towards the semi-circle of waiting eldermen.

"O, brave men!" he went on, "O, wonderful seeker of danger! Behold! I, _g'la_, a fool, stand before you and yet the killer of B'chumbiri sits trembling and will not rise before me, fearing my vengeance. Am I so terrible?"

His wide open eyes were fixed upon the uncle of B'chumbiri, and the old man returned the gaze defiantly.

"Am I so terrible?" Bones went on, gently. "Do men fear me when I walk? Or run to their huts at the sound of my puc-a-puc? Do women wring their hands when I pass?"

Again there was a little titter, but M'gobo, the uncle of B'chumbiri, grimacing now in his rage, was not amongst the laughers.

"Yet the brave one who slew----"

M'gobo sprang to his feet.

"Lord," he said harshly, "why do you put all men to shame for your sport?"

"This is no sport, M'gobo," answered Bones quickly. "This is a palaver, a killing palaver. Was it a woman who slew B'chumbiri? so that she is not present at this palaver. Lo, then I go to hold council with women!"

M'gobo's face was all distorted like a man stricken with paralysis.

"Tibbetti!" he said, "I slew B'chumbiri--according to custom--and I will answer to Sandi, who is a man, and understands such palavers."

"Think well," said Bones, deathly white, "think well, O man, before you say this."

"I killed him, O fool," said M'gobo loudly, "though his father turned woman at the last--with these hands I cut him, using two knives----"

"Damn you!" said Bones, and shot him dead.

* * * * *

Hamilton, so far convalescent that he could smoke a cigarette, heard the account without interruption.

"So there you are, sir," said Bones at the side. "An' I felt like a jolly old murderer, but, dear old officer, what was I to do?"

Still Hamilton said nothing, and Bones shifted uncomfortably.

"For goodness gracious sake don't sit there like a bally old owl," he said, fretfully. "Was I wrong?"

Hamilton smiled.