Bones of the River - Edgar Wallace [77]
Hamilton did not like coloured people. He loved natives, he tolerated white men, but of all the types of half-breed he had reason to dislike, there was none approaching in loathsomeness to the Portuguese.
“There’s a hut in the residency garden you can have,” he said shortly. “Or” – as a thought struck him – “I can lend you a canoe and paddlers to take you to the Isisi River, where you will probably find Mr Tibbetts.”
To his surprise, the man readily agreed to this suggestion, and it was with mingled relief and apprehension that Hamilton saw him depart, watching the grey tall hat, fascinated, until it disappeared, with its owner, round the bend of the river.
The object of Pinto’s visit can be briefly stated, though in his modesty he omitted such a confession. He had come to secure £500, and he was perfectly willing to accept half. That Bones would pay rather than face an exposure he had no doubt at all. Other men had paid: a young chief clerk at Lagos had paid £300; a middle-aged Commissioner at Nigeria had paid even more before he realised what a fool he had been, and circularised a description of Mr Fernandez, alias Gonsalez, up and down the coast. Of this disquieting action Pinto was blissfully unaware.
The rôle of the outraged husband, unexpectedly appearing to the victim in the bush, away from the counsel of interfering lawyers and the devastating advice of friends, usually, in Mr Pinto’s experience, had the desired effect. In Lagos, where he was known, there might have been difficulties, but even these had not arisen. Men who live in the bush carry large sums of ready money. Their belt is their banker, and Pinto did not doubt that Bones could produce from the leathern ceinture about his thin middle, sufficient to keep Pinto Fernandez and his erratic wife in comfort through many a long and pleasing siesta. As he paddled gently up the river, he did not dream of failure, and the existence of D’lama was unknown to him.
D’lama-m’popo was of the forest, and owing little but the nebulous allegiance which is given by the forest folk to the nearest paramount chief. And where loyalty is largely determined by propinquity, treason is a word which it was absurd to employ. Thus, D’lama had committed many small misdeeds, and at least one of serious importance.
D’lama owed a fisherman half a bag of salt, and the fisherman, in despair of securing a just settlement, offered D’lama the equivalent of the other half bag, together with a fat dog, a mythical cache of ivory and the freedom of the village, on condition that D’lama, who was a bachelor, took to his hut the fisherman’s daughter Kobali, by her father’s account a virgin, indubitably unmarried, and old by the river standard, for she had seen eighteen rainy seasons.
Now, when a woman of the river reaches the advanced age of eighteen without finding for herself a husband, a hut, and a share of the cooking, there is usually something wrong, and what was wrong with Kobali was her ability to converse with birds, a most disconcerting accomplishment, for birds know the secrets of all, since they listen in unsuspected and hidden places, and are great gossips among themselves.
There was a man in the far-away Ituri Forest who understood their cheep-twit talk, and he became a king and died honoured, and some say that on the day of his passing no bird was seen for a hundred miles.
There was another man whose career was less glorious, and there was the mad woman of Bolongo. And there was Kobali. Her father would have kept her secret, for people with supernatural powers are unpopular, and are sometimes furtively “chopped” on dark nights, but she was overseen by an elder of the village talking earnestly to three little birds that sat on a bough with their heads perked on one side, and these birds were in a state of such excitement that the elder knew that she was telling them about the wife he had left in the forest to die, because she was sick and old. And, sure enough, a week later, came Mr Commissioner Sanders