The Twelve African Novels (A Collection). Edgar Wallace

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СКАЧАТЬ Halfway down the beach he turned about and came back to Sanders.

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

      “Go, you bargaining child!” said Sanders, without irritation.

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

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

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

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

      “Through the French territory,” said his son; “it’s dead easy.”

      There was another long pause.

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

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

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

      This, in brief, was his plan.

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

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

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

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

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

      “Ho, Sandi!” he called boisterously.

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

      For answer came a peal of hoarse laughter.

      “Ho, Sandi!” bawled M’Wafamba; “white man, pig eater, white monkey!”

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

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

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

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

      “You are a liar, and an eater of liars,” said the reckless M’Wafamba; and when Sanders put out his hand to feel the neck of the man for telltale swellings, M’Wafamba tried to bite it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      “I’fambi M’Waka,” whimpered the man by the tree, “commonly M’Wafamba — of the village of the Pool of Devils.”

      “M’Wafamba,” said Sanders, “being of the Isisi people, you know something of me and my way.”

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

      “And if I say ‘death’ what do I mean?”

      “Lord, you mean death, as all men on the river know,” said M’Wafamba.

      Sanders nodded.

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

      Then the man rolled his head drunkenly.

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

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

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

      “Flack!”

      M’Wafamba woke the forest with a yell.

      “Enough!” he screamed. “I speak!”

      They loosed him.

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

      “What manner of Arabi was this?” asked Sanders.

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

      “When did you see him?”

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