Bones of the River - Edgar Wallace [80]
“Oh master, I see you,” said D’lama respectfully.
Pinto, who knew most of the dialects of the rivers, answered readily.
“Give me food, man,” he said. “I am going on a long journey for Sandi. Also I want sleep, for I have walked through the forest, battling with wild beasts, all this night. And if any ask you about me you shall be silent, for it is Sandi’s desire that no man should know that I am hereabouts.”
D’lama prepared a meal, brought water from the forest spring, and left his guest to sleep. That evening, Pinto was wakened by the entry of his host.
“Man, Sandi wants you,” said D’lama, “for this is the talk amongst all the villagers, that a certain one was taken prisoner by Sandi and escaped, and the master has sent word that you must be taken.”
“That is fool’s talk,” said Pinto. “You see I am a white man, wearing trousers.”
D’lama surveyed him critically. “That is true, for you are not quite black,” he said. “Now, if you are a white man, then I have a wonderful thought in my head. For hereabouts lives a witch who talks with birds, and the birds told her that she should marry a white man, and after that the land should prosper.”
“I am already married,” said Pinto hastily.
“Who is not?” asked the crude D’lama. “Yet you shall marry her, and I will be silent. And no people live in this forest who talk – except the birds. If you say no; then I will take you to Sandi, and there is an end. But if you say you will marry, then I will bring this girl to you.”
“Bring the woman,” said Pinto after a moment’s thought; but whatever plans he had formed were purposeless.
“First I will tie you by the hands and feet,” said D’lama calmly, “lest when I am gone, an evil spirit comes into your heart and you run away.”
And Pinto, protesting, allowed himself to be trussed, for D’lama-m’popo was a man of inches and terribly strong.
The woman who talked with birds was in her old place beneath the nests of the weaver birds when D’lama arrived.
“You are D’lama, the killer of old women,” she said, not looking round, “and a bird has told me that you have found a white man.”
“That is true, Kobali,” said D’lama, in a sweat, “and as to the old woman, a tree fell upon her –”
Kobali rose silently and led the way into the forest, D’lama following. After a while they came to the hut where Pinto lay, in some pain, and together they brought him out into the light of the moon, and the girl examined him critically whilst the bonds were being removed.
“He is a white that is not black, and a black that is not white,” she said. “I think this man will do for me, for he seems very pretty.”
Pinto’s hand rose mechanically to twirl his sparse moustache.
* * *
“I can’t really understand what happened to that fellow,” said Sanders. “He must have got in the track of a leopard.”
“Or the leopard must have got on his,” suggested Hamilton. “By the way, what did he want with Bones?”
But Sanders shook his head. He was a model of discretion, and Bones, in his many journeys up and down the river, never guessed that from behind the bush that fringed the river near the Isisi, dwelt one who, in happier circumstances, had described himself as Dom Gonsalez, and who possessed a very charming wife in the town of Funchal – or did possess her until she got tired of waiting, and contracted a morganatic marriage with the second officer of a banana boat out of Cadiz.
THE LAKE OF THE DEVIL
M’suru, an Akasava chief of some importance, was hunting one day on the wrong side of the Ochori frontier when there appeared, at a most unpropitious moment, a man called Mabidini, who was something that was neither ranger nor hunter, yet was a little of each, for he watched the frontiers for his lord Bosambo, and poached skins secretly in the Akasava country.
He was a young man, and, by the standards which are set by the women of the Upper River, handsome; and these qualities made his subsequent offence the more unforgivable, for M’suru was middle-aged and fat and past the attractive period of life, so that only the women he bought were his, and