Bones of the River - Edgar Wallace [63]
In seven moons he came back and went to the hut of Saka, and they dug up the ground, but no treasure was there.
“O ko,” said Saka, in cheerful dismay, “this is because of my magic! For I must have looked too hard at the pretty wonders of yours, M’guru, and they have gone into nothing.”
M’guru, who was a trading man and therefore sceptical by nature and training, carried his woes to Sanders, and the Commissioner summoned Saka before him.
“Man,” he said, “they tell me you are a great magician, and that whatsoever you look upon disappears. I also am a magician, and lo! I stretch out my hand, and where is the free man who walks without shackles on his legs? He has vanished to my Village of Irons, where bad men labour everlastingly for the Government, and even great chiefs are no higher than fishermen. Now go, Saka, and look well with your wonderful eyes for the treasure of M’guru. And because you are a magician, I think you will find it.”
Saka went away, and came back in three days’ time with the story of his discovery.
“Lord, by the magic of my eyes I have seen all these wonderful treasures of M’guru. They are buried at three trees by the water, and I have dug them up and given them to M’guru.”
“That is good,” said Sanders. “Saka, I am a man of few words and many duties. Do not let me come again to this or that palaver, or there will be unhappiness in your hut.”
He whiffled his cane suggestively, and Saka, who was an imaginative man, winced. Thereafter, he did much to establish his fame with his people, though all his experiments were not uniformly welcomed. He looked upon the young wife of M’guru, his enemy, and she too disappeared, and M’guru shrewdly suspected that she was not buried near the three trees by the water. He sent for the sorcerer by virtue of his authority.
“Saka, by your magic you shall bring me back my young wife, or I shall bind you for Sanders.”
“M’guru,” said Saka, surprised, “I did not know that you had a wife; but by my wonderful powers I will find her and bring her to your hut, and you will give me two teeth[5] because of my talk with the pretty devils who sit around my bed every night and tell me stories.”
It happened that Sanders was in the neighbourhood, and the palaver which followed was brief and, to Saka, painful. Thereafter, the sorcerer’s eyes ceased to function.
Now, Saka was a sour man of middle age; and, like all witch doctors, intensely vain. The punishment, no less than the loss of his prestige, embittered him; and, being of an inventive turn of mind, he discovered a method of regaining the authority which, whilst it did not profit him greatly, caused intense annoyance to those whom he chose to regard as his enemies. Men and women who came secretly in his hut at night to seek his intervention in their affairs, heard of a new and more potent devil than any that had come to the Lake country. His name was M’lo; he was of microscopic size, and worked his mischief from some familiar article of clothing where he had lodged himself.
“You have fire in your teeth,” he said to one supplicant, whose swollen jaw and agonised expression were eloquent of his suffering. “My magic tells me that M’lo is working powerfully against you.” He closed his eyes in an ecstasy of divination. “He lives in the blue cloth of E’gera, the wife of M’guru. This you must burn. If you betray me to M’lo, and he knows I have told you, he will kill you?”
The following morning, the beautiful blue cloth which encircled the figure of E’gera, principal and favourite wife of M’guru, vanished, and became a heap of black and smouldering fibre in the recesses of the forest.
To a man whose wife had given him cause for uneasiness (to put the matter mildly) he revealed the presence of M’lo in the growing corn of an enemy’s garden, and in the morning no corn stood where the seeker after his hateful oppressor had searched.
He discovered M’lo malignly