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come and speak freely. And you shall tell them that the word he spoke before Sandi was no true word, but to-night he shall speak the truth, and when Sandi is gone we [Pg 115]shall have wonderful guns and destroy all who oppose us."

This the witch-doctor did, and came back by the river path.

Here, by all accounts, he met Bosambo, and would have passed on; but the Chief of the Ochori, being in a curious mind and being, moreover, suspicious, was impressed by the importance of the messenger, and made inquiries....

An old man is a great lover of life, and after the witch-doctor's head had been twice held under water—for the river was providentially near—he gasped the truth.

The three missioners were very grateful guests indeed. They were the more grateful because Patricia Hamilton was an unexpected hostess. They clicked their heels and kissed her hand and drank her health many times in good hock. The dinner was a feast worthy of Lucullus, they swore, the wine was perfect, and the coffee—which Abiboo handed round with a solemn face—was wonderful.

They sat chatting for a time, and then the bearded man looked at his watch.

"To bed, gentlemen," he said gaily. "We leave you, Herr Commissioner, in good friendship, we trust?"

"Oh, most excellent," said Sanders awkwardly, for he was a poor liar, and knew that his spies [Pg 116]were waiting on the bank to "pick up" these potential enemies of his.

He watched them go ashore and disappear into the darkness of the forest path that leads to the village.

The moon was rising over the tall trees, and an expectant gathering of Akasava notables were waiting for a white spokesman who came not, when Bosambo and his bodyguard were engaged in lifting three unconscious men and laying them in a large canoe. He himself paddled the long boat to midstream, where two currents run swiftly, one to the sea and one to the Isisi River, which winds for a hundred miles until it joins the Congo.

"Go with God," said Bosambo piously, as he stepped into his own canoe, and released his hold of the other with its slumbering freight, "for if your king is so great, he will bring you to your own lands; and if he is not great, then you are liars. O Abiboo"—he spoke over his shoulder to the sergeant of Houssas—"tell me, how many of the magic white stones of Bonesi did you put in their drink?"

"Bosambo, I put four in each, as you told me, and if my lord Tibbetti misses them, what shall I say?"

"You shall say," said Bosambo, "that this is Sandi's own word—that when men plan evils they must first sleep. And I think these men will sleep for a long time. Perhaps they will sleep for ever—all things are with God."

[Pg 117]

CHAPTER VI THE MEDICINE MAN

At the flood season, before the turbulent tributaries of the Isisi River had been induced to return to their accustomed channels, Sanders came back to headquarters a very weary man, for he had spent a horrid week in an endeavour—successful, but none the less nerve-racking—to impress an indolent people that the swamping of their villages was less a matter of Providence and ghosts than the neglect of elementary precaution.

"For I told you, Ranabini," said an exasperated Sanders, "that you should keep the upper channel free from trees and branches, and I have paid you many bags of salt for your services."

"Lord, it is so," said Ranabini, scratching his brown leg thoughtfully.

"At the full of the moon, before the rains, did I not ask you if the channel was clear, and did you not say it was like the street of your village?" demanded Sanders, in wrath.

"Lord," said Ranabini frankly, "I lied to you, thinking your lordship was mad. For what other [Pg 118]man would foresee with his wonderful eye that rains would come? Therefore, lord, I did not think of the upper channel, and many trees floated down and made a little dam. Lord, I am an ignorant man, and my mind is full of my own brother, who has come from a long distance to see me, for he is a very sick man."

Sanders's mind was occupied by no thought of Ranabini's sick brother, as the dazzling white Zaire went thrashing her way down stream. For he himself was a tired man, and needed rest, and there was a dose of malaria looming in the offing, as his aching head told him. It was as though his brains were arranged in slats, like a venetian blind, and these slats were opening and closing swiftly, bringing with each lightning flicker a momentary unconsciousness.

Captain Hamilton met him on the quay, and when Sanders landed—walking a thought unsteadily, and instantly began a long and disjointed account of his adventures on a Norwegian salmon river—Hamilton took him by the arm and led the way to the bungalow.

In ten minutes he was assisting Sanders into his pyjamas, Sanders protesting, albeit feebly, and when, after forcing an astonishing amount of quinine and arsenic down his chief's throat, Hamilton came from the semi-darkness of the bungalow to the white glare of the barrack square, Hamilton was thoughtful.

"Let one of your women watch by the bed of [Pg 119]the lord Sandi," said he to Sergeant Abiboo, of the Houssas, "and she shall call me if he grows worse."

"On my life," said Abiboo, and was going off.

"Where is Tibbetti?" asked Hamilton.

The sergeant turned back and seemed embarrassed.

"Lord," he said, "Tibbetti has gone with the lady, your sister, to make a palaver with Jimbujini, the witch-doctor of the Akasava. They sit in the forest in a magic circle, and lo! Tibbetti grows very wise."

Hamilton swore under his breath. He had ordered Lieutenant Tibbetts, his second-in-command, prop, stay, and aide-de-camp, to superintend the drill of some raw Kano recruits who had been sent from the coast.

"Go tell the lord Tibbetti to come to me," he said, "but first send your woman to Sandi."

Lieutenant Tibbetts, with his plain, boyish face all red with his exertions, yet dignified withal, came hurriedly from his studies.

"Come aboard, sir," he said, and saluted extravagantly, blinking at his superior with a curious solemnity of mien which was his own peculiar expression.

"Bones," said Hamilton, "where the dickens have you been?"

Bones drew a long breath. He hesitated, then—

"Knowledge," he said shortly.

[Pg 120]Hamilton looked at his subordinate in alarm.

"Dash it, you aren't off your head, too, are you?"

Bones shook his head with vigour.

"Knowledge of the occult, sir and brother-officer," he said. "One is never too old to learn, sir, in this jolly old world."

"Quite right," said Hamilton; "in fact, I'm pretty certain that you'll never live long enough to learn everything."

"Thank you, sir," said Bones.

The girl, who had had less qualms than Bones when the summons arrived, and had, in consequence, returned more leisurely, came into the room.

"Pat," said her brother, "Sanders is down with fever."

"Fever!" she said a little breathlessly. "It isn't—dangerous?"

Bones, smiling indulgently, soothed her.

"Nothin' catchin', dear Miss Patricia Hamilton," he began.

"Please don't be stupid," she said so fiercely that Bones recoiled. "Do you think I'm afraid of catching anything? Is it dangerous for Mr. Sanders?" she asked her brother.

"No more dangerous than a cold in the head," he answered flippantly. "My dear child, we all have fever. You'll have it, too, if you go out at sunset without your mosquito boots."

He explained, with the easy indifference of a [Pg 121]man inured to malaria, the habits of the mosquito—his predilection for ankles and wrists, where the big veins and arteries are nearer to the surface—but the girl was not reassured. She would have sat up with Sanders, but the idea so alarmed Hamilton that she abandoned it.

"He'd never forgive me," he said. "My dear girl, he'll be as right as a trivet in the morning."

She was sceptical, but, to her amazement, Sanders turned up at breakfast his usual self, save that he was a little weary-eyed, and that his hand shook when he raised his coffee-cup to his lips. A miracle, thought Patricia Hamilton, and said so.

"Not at all, dear miss," said Bones, now, as ever, accepting full credit for all phenomena she praised, whether natural or supernatural. "This is simply nothin' to what happened to me. Ham, dear old feller, do you remember when I was brought down from the Machengombi River? Simply delirious—ravin'—off my head."

"So much so," said Hamilton, slicing the top off his egg, "that we didn't think you were ill."

"If you'd seen me," Bones went on, solemnly shaking one skinny forefinger at the girl, "you'd have said: 'Bones is for the High Jump.'"

"I should have said nothing so vulgar, Bones," she retorted. "And was it malaria?"

"Ah," said Hamilton triumphantly, "I was too much of a gentleman to hint that it wasn't. Press the question, Pat."

[Pg 122]Bones shrugged his shoulders and cast a look of withering contempt upon his superior.

"In the execution of one's duty, dear Miss Patricia H," he said, "the calibre of the gun that lays a fellow low, an' plunges his relations an' creditors into mournin', is beside the point. The only consideration, as dear old Omar says, is—

"'The movin' finger hits, an', havin' hit,
Moves on, tum tumty tumty tay,
And all a feller does won't make the slightest difference.'"

"Is that Omar or Shakespeare?" asked the dazed Hamilton.

"Be quiet, dear. What was the illness, Bones?"

"Measles," said Hamilton brutally, "and German measles at that."

"Viciously put, dear old officer, but, nevertheless, true," said Bones buoyantly. "But when the hut's finished, I'll return good for evil. There's goin' to be a revolution, Miss Patricia Hamilton. No more fever, no more measles—health, wealth, an' wisdom, by gad!"

"Sunstroke," diagnosed Hamilton. "Pull yourself together, Bones—you're amongst friends."

But Bones was superior to sarcasm.

There was a creature of Lieutenant Tibbetts a solemn, brown man, who possessed, in addition to a vocabulary borrowed from a departed professor of bacteriology, a rough working knowledge [Pg 123]of the classics. This man's name was, as I have already explained, Abid Ali or Ali Abid, and in him Bones discovered a treasure beyond price.

Bones had recently built himself a large square hut near the seashore—that is to say, he had, with the expenditure of a great amount of midnight oil, a pair of compasses, a box of paints, and a ⊤-square, evolved a somewhat complicated plan whereon certain blue oblongs stood for windows, and certain red cones indicated doors. To this he had added an elevation in the severe Georgian style.

With his plan beautifully drawn to scale, with sectional diagrams and side elevations embellishing its margin, he had summoned Mojeri of the Lower Isisi, famous throughout the land as a builder of great houses, and to him he had entrusted the execution of his design.

"This you shall build for me, Mojeri," said Bones, sucking the end of his pencil and gazing lovingly at the plan outspread before him, "and you shall be famous all through the world. This room shall be twice as large as that, and you shall cunningly contrive a passage so that I may move from one to the other, and none see me come or go. Also, this shall be my sleeping-place, and this a great room where I will practise powerful magics."

Mojeri took the plan in his hand and looked at it. He turned it upside down and looked at [Pg 124]it that way. Then he looked at it sideways.

"Lord," said he, putting down the plan with a reverent hand, "all these wonders I shall remember."

"And did he?" asked Hamilton, when Bones described the interview.

Bones blinked and swallowed.

"He went away and built me a square hut—just a plain square hut. Mojeri is an ass, sir—a jolly old fraud an' humbug, sir. He——"

"Let me see the plan," said Hamilton, and his subordinate produced the cartridge paper.

"H'm!" said Hamilton, after a careful scrutiny. "Very pretty. But how did you get into your room?"

"Through the door, dear old officer," said the sarcastic Bones.

"I thought it might be through the roof," said Hamilton, "or possibly you made one of your famous dramatic entries through a star-trap in the floor—

"'Who is it speaks in those sepulchral tones?
It is the demon king—the grisly Bones!
Bing!'

"and up you pop amidst red fire and smoke."

A light dawned on Bones.

"Do you mean to tell me, jolly old Ham, that I forgot to put a door into my room?" he asked incredulously, and peered over his chief's shoulder.

[Pg 125]"That is what I mean, Bones. And where does the passage lead to?"

"That goes

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