The Twelve African Novels (A Collection). Edgar WallaceЧитать онлайн книгу.
the God-woman who gives medicine,” said. Abiboo, without any display of emotion. “For I fear that you will die, and I wish for a book that I did everything properly.”
“Cautious devil,” muttered Sanders, and relapsed again into unconsciousness.
When he awoke again he did not hear the beat of the steamer’s paddles. It was to a surprising calm and ease he awoke. He was lying in a big room in a small bed, and the sheets were of the finest linen — which on the steamer they had not been. ‘There was a big bowl of blue flowers on a table near the bed, and a strange fragrance.
It cannot be said that he recognised the place, because he had never before seen the interior of Miss Glandynne’s bedroom; but he had a dim recollection that somebody had said he was to be taken to her. His first conscious emotion was one of extreme annoyance that he had been a nuisance to somebody, his second was one of doubt as to his own condition.
He turned his head slowly to view the erring arm. He would not have been surprised if he had found it missing. It was here safe enough, and he sighed his relief. Also it was near enough to normal size to be comforting.
He ventured to move the hand of the injured limb, and to his great pleasure found no difficulty to and experienced no pain.
Then Ruth Glandynne came in — a beautiful vision in that dark land.
She smiled, lifted a warning finger, shifted his pillow a little, and sat down by his side.
“What is wrong with the Akasava?” he asked suddenly. It was apropos of nothing; he had not even been thinking of the Akasava, but something impelled the question.
He saw her face go suddenly grave.
“I — I think you had better not bother about the Akasava,” she faltered. “You must keep very quiet.”
“I must know!” he said.
His voice was cracked and weak, but she knew that, whatever might be the result, she must tell him.
He lay quietly with closed eyes while she spoke, and when she had finished he lay silent — so silent that she thought he had relapsed into unconsciousness.
Then he opened his eyes.
“Send a messenger to the Ochori,” he said, “and bid Bosambo the chief come to me.”
Bosambo was immensely unpopular amongst all other chiefs and peoples.
Bosambo was an alien — being a Krooman who had fled from Liberia owing to the persecutions of the government of that model republic. If you should ask how it came about that the majestic machinery of state came to be put into motion against so insignificant a man as Bosambo — a common man, if you might judge him by his place in the state — I enlighten you by offering the explanation that Bosambo had killed a warder at the convict settlement whither he had been sent for theft. The adventurer wandered across Africa till he came to the milk-hearted Ochori, in which he became paramount chief of the tribe on the sudden and inexplicable death of its rightful chief.
It is sufficient to say that this exconvict made men of a timid people, giving them pride and a sort of spurious courage which was made up as to three-parts of fear — for Bosambo had pliant whips of rhinoceros hide, and was very quick to take offence.
One morning, in the spring of the year, Bosambo came out of his hut to find the world exquisitely beautiful — being covered with the freshest green of growing things, the sky flecked with white clouds, and a gentle breeze wrinkling the surface of the big river.
The city of the Ochori was built on the slope of a hill, and you looked across the N’Gombi Forest to the faint blur of the mountain of trees, which is in the Akasava territory.
Bosambo, who was no poet and admired only those beauties of nature which were edible, glanced disconsolately along the broad street of his city, where women were preparing the morning meals, and where the smoke of a score of little fires drifted lazily. Bosambo’s three common wives were engaged before the next hut in a similar operation; his chief wife was not visible, being of the faith which requires that woman shall have no existence save to her lord.
He turned his face to the western end of the city and walked slowly.
Bosambo was no fool. He had lived amongst civilised people, he spoke English, he was a thief who had made his living in a nation of thieves.
He was aware of the happenings in the Akasava. There had been a rising — a section of the people which had declared against rebellion and had been wiped from the face of the earth. Also the Isisi had joined in the general movement, had destroyed the timid of their number, and forced the folk of the Bolenzi to servitude.
Bosambo had received an invitation to do homage to Toloni, the King, and had sent back a message which was at once comprehensive and coarse. He was safe from reprisals for a week or so. Between him and the Akasava lay the mission station where Sandi was — dying, by all accounts, but certainly there. And tied up to the mission bank was the Zaire and half a company of Houssas, to say nothing of two immense guns.
But if Bosambo was contemptuous of the self-appointed Ring of the World — as Toloni called himself — there were men of the Ochori who, remembering Bosambo’s pliant whip, and his readiness to exercise it, corresponded with Toloni, and Bosambo knew that half the Ochori people were far gone in sedition.
Yet he was not over-distressed — that worried him less than another matter.
“Light of my life and joy of my soul,” he said to the woman who shared the gaudy magnificence of his thatched harem. “If Sandi dies there is no virtue in religion, for I have prayed to all gods, to the Prophets, and to the lords Marki, Luko, and Johanni — also to the Virgin of whom the Marist Brothers told me; and I have prayed to crosses and to ju-jus, and have sacrificed a goat and a chicken before the Ochori fetish.”
“Mahomet,” she said reprovingly, “all this is evil, for there is but one God.”
“He will praise my diligence in seeking Him,” said Bosambo philosophically. “Yet, if Sandi recover, I will thank all gods lest I miss the Him who benefited my master.”
His position was a delicate one, as he knew. Only the previous night he had caught a secret messenger from Toloni, who came to call upon the Ochori to attack Sandi’s men from the north, driving them towards the waiting legions of the rebel king. Bosambo extracted the full message from the courier before he disposed of him.
Two more days of anxious waiting followed. A headman of the Ochori, who had been promised the chiefship of the tribe, decided to rush matters, and crept into Bosambo’s hut one evening to create the necessary vacancy.
Bosambo, who was waiting for him, clubbed him into insensibility with promptitude and dispatch, dragged him in the darkness of the night to the river bank, and slid him into the water with a rope about his neck and a stone attached to the rope.
It brought matters to a head in one sense, for, missing their leader, his faction called upon Bosambo and demanded that the missing man be handed over to them. Their chief’s reply was an emphatic one. The spokesman carried the marks of Bosambo’s eloquence to the grave. How matters might have developed it is difficult to guess, but Sandi’s summons came to Bosambo, and he called his people together.
“I go to Sandi,” he told them, “Sandi who is my master and yours, in addition to being my relative, as you know. And behold I leave behind me a people who are ungrateful and vicious. Now I say to you that in my absence you shall go about your work and do nothing evil — that you shall neither attend to the council of fools nor follow your own wicked fancies — for when I return I shall be swift to punish; and if any man disobey me, I will put out his eyes and leave him in the forest for the beasts to hunt. I will do this by Ewa, who is death.”
After which Bosambo departed for the mission station, taking with him his favourite wife and fifty fighting men.
He came to Sandi’s within forty-eight hours of