Bones of the River - Edgar Wallace [13]
Mr Commissioner Sanders was mad, but not slayable, by reason of his soldiers, his long-nosed “wung-wung” (so they called his hotchkiss) and the brass-jacketted guns that said “ha-ha-ha!”
Nobody but a madman would go squelching through the noisome mud of the wood, peering into foul huts, raking over ground for signs of skeletons (all that the crocodiles did not take was the little red ants’ by right). Yet this is what Sandi did. He slowed his fine boat and brought her to the bank.
“I have impressed upon Lulaga the impropriety of hastening the deaths of his relatives,” he said to Captain Hamilton of the Houssas, “and he has sworn by M’shimba and his own particular devil that there shall be no more blinding or old-age pensioning,” he added grimly.
Hamilton smiled wearily. “‘The customs of the country must not be lightly overridden or checked,’” he quoted from a famous Instruction received from the Colonial Office in bygone days – there isn’t a Commissioner from K’sala to Tuli Drift who cannot recite it by heart, especially after dinner.
“‘Nor,’” he went on, “‘should his religious observances or immemorial practices be too rudely suppressed, remembering that the native, under God’s providence, is a man and a brother.’”
“Shut up!” snarled Sanders, but the inexorable Houssa was not to be suppressed.
“‘He should be approached gently,’” he went on, “‘with arguments and illustrations obvious to his simple mind. Corporal punishment must under no circumstances be inflicted save in exceptionally serious crimes, and then only by order of the supreme judiciary of the country – ’”
“That looks to me like a new hut,” said Sanders, and stepped over the hastily rigged gangway, twirling a mahogany stick in his thin, brown hand.
Threading his way through a green and anaemic plantation, he came to the hut, and there he found B’saba, sometime headman of the village of M’fusu, and B’saba was mad and silly and was chuckling and whimpering alternately, being far gone in sleeping sickness, which turns men into beasts. He was blind, and he had not been blind very long.
The nose of Sandi elaka wrinkled.
“O man, I see you, but you cannot see me. I am Sandi, who gives justice. Now tell me, who brought you here?”
“Lulaga the king,” said the old man woefully. “Also he has taken my pretty eyes.”
He died that night, Sanders squatting on the ground by his side and feeding the fire that warmed him. And they buried him deep, and Sanders spoke well of him, for he had been a faithful servant of Government for many years.
In the dawn-grey he turned the nose of the Zaire against the push of the black waters and came to the village of the chief, to that man’s uneasiness.
The lokalis beat a summons to a great palaver, and in the reed-roofed hut Sanders sat in judgment.
“Lord!” said the trembling Lulaga. “I did this because of a woman of mine who was mocked by the old man in his madness.”
“Let her come here,” said Sanders, and they brought her, a mature woman of sixteen, very slim, supple and defiant.
“Give me your medal, Lulaga,” said Sanders, and the chief lifted the cord that held his silver medal of chieftainship. And when Sanders had placed it upon the neck of a trustworthy man, and this man had eaten salt from the palm of the Commissioner’s hand, soldiers tied