The Keepers of the King's Peace Part 24

Child should not be encouraged to sit up--though quite able to, being very forward for eight months--owing to strain on back. On no account should child be thrown up in the air and caught.

5. Any further information can be obtained at Hut 7.

(Signed)

AUGUSTUS TIBBETTS, Lieutenant.

"All based upon my personal observation and experience," said Bones triumphantly--"not a single tip from anybody."

"I think you are really marvellous, Bones," said the girl, and meant it.

Henry Hamilton Bones sat upright in a wooden cot. A fat-faced atom of brown humanity, bald-headed and big-eyed, he sucked his thumb and stared at the visitor, and from the visitor to Bones.

Bones he regarded with an intelligent interest which dissolved into a fat chuckle of sheer delight.

"Isn't it--isn't it simply extraordinary?" demanded Bones ecstatically.

"In all your long an' painful experience, dear old friend an' co-worker, have you ever seen anything like it? When you remember that babies don't open their eyes until three weeks after they're born----"

"Da!" said Henry Hamilton Bones.

"Da yourself, Henry!" squawked his foster-father.

"Do da!" said Henry.

The smile vanished from Bones's face, and he bit his lip thoughtfully.

"Do da!" he repeated. "Let me see, what is 'do da'?"

"Do da!" roared Henry.

"Dear old Miss Hamilton," he said gently, "I don't know whether Henry wants a drink or whether he has a pain in his stomach, but I think that we had better leave him in more experienced hands."

He nodded fiercely to the native woman nurse and made his exit.

Outside they heard Henry's l.u.s.ty yell, and Bones put his hand to his ear and listened with a strained expression on his face.

Presently the tension pa.s.sed.

"It _was_ a drink," said Bones. "Excuse me whilst I make a note." He pulled out his pocket-book and wrote: "'Do da' means 'child wants drink.'"

He walked back to the Residency with her, giving her a remarkable insight into Henry's vocabulary. It appeared that babies have a language of their own, which Bones boasted that he had almost mastered.

She lay awake for a very long time that night, thinking of Bones, his simplicity and his lovableness. She thought, too, of Sanders, grave, aloof, and a little shy, and wondered....

She woke with a start, to hear the voice of Bones outside the window.

She felt sure that something had happened to Henry. Then she heard Sanders and her brother speaking, and realized that it was not Henry they were discussing.

She looked at her watch--it was three o'clock.

"I was foolish to trust that fellow," Sanders was saying, "and I know that Bosambo is not to blame, because he has always given a very wide berth to the Kulumbini people, though they live on his border."

She heard him speak in a strange tongue to some unknown fourth, and guessed that a spy of the Government had come in during the night.

"We'll get away as quickly as we can, Bones," Sanders said. "We can take our chance with the lower river in the dark; it will be daylight before we reach the bad shoals. You need not come, Hamilton."

"Do you think Bones will be able to do all you want?" Hamilton's tone was dubious.

"Pull yourself together, dear old officer," said Bones, raising his voice to an insubordinate pitch.

She heard the men move from the verandah, and fell asleep again, wondering who was the man they spoke of and what mischief he had been brewing.

On a little tributary stream, which is hidden by the island of bats, was the village of Kulumbini. High elephant gra.s.s hid the poor huts even from they who navigate a cautious way along the centre of the narrow stream. On the shelving beach one battered old canoe of ironwood, with its sides broken and rusted, the indolence of its proprietor made plain by the badly spliced panels, was all that told the stranger that the habitations of man were nigh.

Kulumbini was a term of reproach along the great river and amongst the people of the Akasava, the Isisi, and the N'gombi, no less than among that most tolerant of tribes the Ochori. They were savage people, immensely brave, terrible in battle, but more terrible after.

Kulumbini, the village and city of the tribe, was no more than an outlier of a fairly important tribe which occupied forest land stretching back to the Ochori boundary. Their territory knew no frontier save the frontiers of caprice and desire. They had neither nationality nor national ambition, and would sell their spears for a bunch of fish, as the saying goes. Their one consuming pa.s.sion and one great wish was that they should not be overlooked, and, so long as the tribes respected this eccentricity, the Kulumbini distressed no man.

How this desire for isolation arose, none know. It is certain that once upon a time they possessed a king who so shared their views that he never came amongst them, but lived in a forest place which is called to this day S'furi-S'foosi, "The trees (or glade) of the distant king."

They had demurred at Government inspection, and Sanders, coming up the little river on the first of his visits, was greeted by a shower of arrows, and his landing opposed by locked s.h.i.+elds.

There are many ways of disposing of opposition, not the least important of which is to be found in two big bra.s.s-barrelled guns which have their abiding place at each end of the _Zaire's_ bridge. There is also a method known as peaceful suasion. Sanders had compromised by going ash.o.r.e for a peace palaver with a revolver in each hand.

He had a whole fund of Bomongo stories, most of which are unfit for printing, but which, nevertheless, find favour amongst the primitive humorists of the Great River. By parable and story, by nonsense tale and romance, by drawing upon his imagination to supply himself with facts, by invoking ju-jus, ghosts, devils, and all the armoury of native superst.i.tion, he had, in those far-off times, prevailed upon the people of Kulumbini not only to allow him a peaceful entrance to their country, but--wonder of wonders!--to contribute, when the moon and tide were in certain relative positions, which in English means once every six months, a certain t.i.the or tax, which might consist of rubber, ivory, fish, or manioc, according to the circ.u.mstances of the people.

More than this, he stamped a solemn treaty--he wrote it in a tattered laundry-book which had come into the chief's possession by some mysterious means--and he hung about the neck of Gulabala, the t.i.tular lord of these strange people, the medal and chain of chieftains.h.i.+p.

Not to be outdone in courtesy, the chief offered him the choice of all the maidens of Kulumbini, and Sanders, to whom such offers were by no means novel, had got out of a delicate situation in his usual manner, having resort to witchcraft for the purpose. For he said, with due solemnity and hushed breath, that it had been predicted by a celebrated witch-doctor of the lower river that the next wife he should take to himself would die of the sickness-mongo, and said Sanders--

"My heart is too tender for your people, O Chief, to lead one of your beautiful daughters to death."

"O Sandi," replied Gulabala hopefully, "I have many daughters, and I should not miss one. And would it not be good service for a woman of my house to die in your hut?"

"We see things differently, you and I," said Sanders, "for, according to my religion, if any woman dies from witchcraft, her ghost sits for ever at the foot of my bed, making terrifying faces."

Thus Sanders had made his escape, and had received at odd intervals the tribute of these remote people.

For years they had dwelt without interference, for they were an unlucky people to quarrel with, and, save for one or two trespa.s.ses on the part of Gulabala, there was no complaint made concerning them. It is not natural, however, for native people to prosper, as these folks did, without there growing up a desire to kill somebody. For does not the river saying run: "The last measure of a full granary is a measure of blood"?

In the dead of a night Gulabala took three hundred spears across the frontier to the Ochori village of Netcka, and returned at dawned with the spears all streaky. And he brought back with him some twenty women, who would have sung the death-song of their men but for the fact that Gulabala and his warriors beat them.

Gulabala slept all the day, he and his spears, and woke to a grisly vision of consequence.

He called his people together and spoke in this wise--

"Soon Sandi and his headmen will come, and, if we are here, there will be many folk hanged, for Sandi is a cruel man. Therefore let us go to a far place in the forest, carrying our treasure, and when Sandi has forgiven us, we will come back."

A good plan but for the sad fact that Bosambo of the Ochori was less than fifty miles away at the dawn of that fatal day, and was marching swiftly to avenge his losses, for not only had Gulabala taken women, but he had taken sixty goats, and that was unpardonable.