The Twelve African Novels (A Collection). Edgar WallaceЧитать онлайн книгу.
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?”
“Two days’ journey from here, lord; but he has gone, for he has great matters on hand — so a man, who is my cousin, told me — for he goes to the Ochori country to lift the white woman, who gives us certain beastly waters to drink when we are sick.”
The trees seemed of a sudden to spin and the ground to heave up under the Commissioner’s feet. He staggered a little, and Abiboo, suspecting fever, leapt to his side and put his strong arm on his shoulders. Only for a second he stood thus, white as death; then —
“Into the boat!” he said.
There was wood enough on board for six hours’ steaming — the mission station was twelve hours at the least.
He swept down the little river swiftly and turned to breast the strong currents of the Isisi. Six hours, almost to the minute, the wood lasted. It brought him to a fishing village, where a store of government wood awaited him.
But the “Arabi” had two days’ start.
Mackiney had bribed and fought his way through the Mishadombi tribe (those “people-who-are-not-all-alike,” about which I must tell you), which serve as a buffer State between French and British territory; he had corrupted the Isisi, and now, with a guide — the cousin of that same M’Wafamba — was moving rapidly on the mission station.
It had been built at the junction of two rivers, in the very spot where, a year before, Sanders had established himself as “the Silent One.”
Mackiney had with him fifty men, mainly of the Kroo coast.
His plan was to take to one of the smaller streams that feed the Isisi. It was navigable for eighty miles and would bring him to within a month’s march of the regular caravan route to Lago — by then he hoped the girl would be compliant.
His party reached within striking distance of his objective late in the afternoon.
The mission house was half a mile from the village, and he sent out spies who brought him word that beyond two native women and a couple of men there was no opposition to be feared.
He sat apart from his men as they cooked their evening meal.
In his long white burnous, his head enveloped in a filleted hood, he was an Arab to the life.
When night came his headman approached him. “Master,” he asked, “what of this Kaffir?”
He spoke of the guide.
“Him you will kill,” said Mackiney in Arabic; “for I do not know how much he guesses.”
“He guesses too much,” said the headman; “for he says that you are no Arab, but a white man.”
“You must lose no time,” said Mackiney shortly.
He sat waiting by the fire they had kindled for him. Soon he heard a little scuffle and turning his head saw a knot of swaying men and a muffled bellowing like that of a man with a cloth upon his face.
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