The Twelve African Novels (A Collection). Edgar WallaceЧитать онлайн книгу.
came in an old canoe with four paddlers, and he brought nothing with him save his rifle, his cooking pots and bedding.
His clothes were patched and soiled, he wore clumsy moccasins of skins, and a helmet which was no longer white and was considerably battered.
He had learnt something and greeted Sanders fluently in the Bomongo dialect.
“Chasi o!” he said, with a bitter little laugh, as he stepped from the canoe, and that word meant “finished” in a certain River dialect.
“As bad as that?” said Sanders.
“Pretty nearly,” replied the other. “I’m no trader, Mr. Sanders, I’m a born philanthropist.”
He laughed again and Sanders smiled in sympathy.
“I’ve seen a lot of life,” he said, “but it doesn’t pay dividends.”
Sanders took him to the residency and found a suit that nearly fitted him.
“I’ll have just one more try,” Jordon went on, “then I light out for another field.”
There were letters awaiting him — letters of infinite sweetness and patience. Letters filled with heroic lies — but too transparent to deceive anybody.
The young man read them and went old-looking.
There were remittances from his agent at Sierra Leone — very small indeed these were, after commission and the like had been subtracted.
Still there was enough to lay in a fresh trading stock, and three weeks later the young man again disappeared into the unknown.
His departure from headquarters coincided with the return of one of the mysterious three.
He came back alone to the place by the River. The huts had disappeared, the garden was again forest, the canoe rotted on the beach — for none had dared disturb it.
He set to work to rebuild a hut. He cleared the garden unaided, and settled down in solitude to the routine of life. He was the chief of the three men, M’Karoka, and like the two men who had disappeared, a man of splendid physique.
Sanders heard of his return and the next time he passed that way he landed.
The man was squatting before his fire, stirring the contents of a steaming pot as Sanders came into sight round the hut which had screened his landing.
He leapt to his feet nimbly, looked for a moment as though he would run away, thought better of it, and raised his hand palm outward in salute.
“Inkoos,” he said in a deep booming voice.
It was an unusual greeting, yet dimly familiar.
“I bring happiness,” said Sanders, using a form of speech peculiar to the Ochori. “Yet since you are a stranger I would ask you what you do, and why do you dwell apart from your own people, for I am the King’s eye and see for him?”
The man spoke slowly, and it was evident to Sanders that the Ochori was not his speech, for he would sometimes hesitate for a word and sometimes fill the deficiency with a word of Swaheli.
“I am from a far country, lord chief,” he said, “and my two cousins. Many moons we journeyed, and we came to this place. Then for certain reasons we returned to our land. And when we did that which we had to do, we started to come back. And one named Vellim was killed by a lion and another died of sickness, and I came alone and here I sit till the appointed time.”
There was a ring of truth in the man’s speech.
Sanders had an instinct for such truth, and he knew that he had not lied.
“What are your people?” he asked; “for it is plain to me that your are a foreigner and like none that I know save one race, the race of the great one Ketchewayo.”
“You have spoken, lord,” said the man gravely; “for though I eat fish, I am of the Zulu people, and I have killed men.”
Sanders eyed him in silence. It was an astounding statement the man made, that he had walked four thousand miles across desert and river and forest, through a hundred hostile nations, had returned thence four thousand miles with his companions and again covered the distance. Yet he was indisputably a Zulu — Sanders knew that much from the moment he had raised his hand in salute and greeted him as a “prince.”
“Rest here,” he said, “keep the law and do ill to none, and you shall be as free as any man — it is finished.”
Sanders pursued a leisurely way down the river, for no pressing matter called him, either to headquarters or to any particular village.
He passed Jordon’s canoe going up stream, and megaphoned a cheery greeting. The young man, though the reverse of cheerful, responded, waving his hand to the white-clad figure on the bridge of the Zaire.
It was with a heavy heart he went on. His stock was dwindling, and he had little to show for his labours. Not even the most tempting and the most gaudy of Manchester goods had induced the lazy Isisi to collect rubber. They offered him dried fish, tiny chickens and service for his desirable cloth and beads, but rubber or gum they were disinclined to collect.
Night was coming on when he made the hut of the solitary stranger.
He directed his paddlers to the beach and landed for the night. Whilst his four men lit a fire he went on to the hut.
M’Karoka with folded arms watched his approach. No other man on the river but would have hastened forward to pay tribute, for black is black and white is white, whether the white man be commissioner or trader.
Jordon had been long enough on the River to see in the attitude of indifference a hint of ungraciousness. Yet the man was polite.
Together they sat and haggled over the price of a piece of cloth — M’Karoka had no use for beads — and when Jordon set his little tent up on the shore, the man was helpful and seemed used to the peculiar ways of tents.
But the most extraordinary circumstance was that M’Karoka had paid for his purchase in money. He had entered his hut when the bargain had been completed and reappeared with a golden sovereign.
He paid four times the value of the cloth, because the negotiations were conducted on a gum basis.
Jordon was thinking this matter out when he retired for the night. It puzzled him, because money, as he knew, was unknown on the River.
He went to sleep to dream of a suburban home and the pale face of his pretty wife. He woke suddenly. It was still night. Outside he could hear the swish-swish of the river and the faint murmur of trees. But these had not awakened him.
There were voices outside the tent, voices that spoke in a language he could not understand.
He pulled on his mosquito boots and opened the fly of the tent.
There was a moon, and he saw M’K-aroka standing before his hut and with him was another. They were quarrelling and the fierce voice of the newcomer was raised in anger. Then of a sudden, before Jordon could reach his revolver, the stranger stepped back a pace and struck twice at M’Karoka.
Jordon saw the gleam of steel in the moonlight, stooped and found his revolver, and dashed out of the tent. M’Karoka lay upon the ground, and his assailant had dashed for the river.
He leapt into Jordon’s canoe. With a stroke he severed the native rope which moored the craft to the shore, and paddled frantically to midstream.
Three times Jordon fired at him. At the third shot he slid overboard like a man suddenly tired.
“Swim out and bring the canoe,” ordered Jordon and turned his attention to M’Karoka. The man was dying; it was not necessary to have an extensive knowledge of surgery to see that he was wounded beyond recovery.
Jordon attempted to plug the more terrible of the