Bones of the River - Edgar Wallace [86]
“I see you, Mabidini!”
M’suru was frothing at the mouth as he howled his hate at the dying man. He heard a shout behind him and turned, his spear poised.
Twice Bones fired and twice missed. The second shot struck the tortured Mabidini and passed him out of the world. Then, in a frenzy of fear, one of M’suru’s men threw a spear. The point caught the bough of a bush, but the ironwood handle, spinning round, struck Bones in the throat, and he stumbled, gasping.
For a second M’suru hesitated, his spear raised, and then the knowledge that the white man would not be alone decided him. He flew down the slope toward the lake, his followers behind him. Far away to the left he saw the red tarboshes of two Houssas. They were at such a distance that he could safely make for the camp where the canoe was moored.
He saw the soldiers running, heard the wrathful yell of Bones racing behind, and made his decision. He was in the canoe, hacking with his razor-sharp hunting spear at the native rope that bound it.
“Shoot!” roared Bones.
The Houssas dropped to their knees, and two bullets struck the water left and right of the racing canoe.
M’suru was steering for the opposite bank, and Bones knew enough of native marksmanship to hope that anything but a chance bullet would catch the flying murderer.
“Cease fire,” he ordered as the breathless soldiery came up to him. M’suru would keep.
“Go back to a little hut by the trees and bury a woman; also take down Mabidini of the Ochori, who is fastened by a spear to a tree,” he said, and, when the men’s backs were turned, watched the canoe.
It had reached the centre of the lake, and the paddles were moving more leisurely.
“You nasty fellow,” said Bones, and said no more, staring open-mouthed at what he saw.
The surface of the lake had become strangely agitated. Great waves were sweeping outward toward the shores, and in the middle there appeared a dark mass, which must have been at least two hundred feet in length.
The men in the canoe were at the western end of the amazing upheaval, and M’suru, seeing the thing, changed his course.
He saw more than Bones, for suddenly the canoe turned and came back toward the camp, the paddlers working frantically.
And then there came up from the depths of the lake a great spade-shaped head. It rose higher and higher at the end of a neck that seemed thin in comparison. Towering over the canoe, the head darted down with incredible swiftness. There was a huge splash. Bones, frozen with horror, saw the head moving about in the water, as the bill of a duck moves when feeding. Another second, and the island had disappeared, and only two fragments of the canoe broke the smooth expanse of water.
* * *
“I knew that you’d see an ichthyosaurus,” said Hamilton. “Bones, you’re incorrigible! You had two fellows there who could have corroborated your yarn, and what did you do with ’em? Sent them away! Oh, Bones, Bones!”
Lieutenant Tibbetts groaned in the agony of his soul.
“My dear old officer… I saw it! A hundred yards long, old officer… I wasn’t dreaming.” He was almost in tears.
The Zaire had pushed her way through the weed-grown river, and lay under the sloping bank of the lake. Sanders had listened in silence to the narrative of his subordinate.
“Bones, I believe you,” he said, to Hamilton’s amazement.
“You believe it, sir?”
Sanders nodded. “Such things have been seen in the volcanic areas in East Africa…it is possible.”
He had intended returning immediately he had discovered that the garbled story of Bones’ capture was untrue – to what watchful tribesman he owed the warning he never discovered. But now he decided to wait, and again, to Hamilton’s surprise, had the Zaire taken back to the Little River.
“But surely, sir – ” began Hamilton.
“You never know,” said Sanders.
He spent the night with Hamilton, filling a small iron water-tank with a variety of explosives, and the Captain of Houssas warmed to his task. In the early morning Hamilton fixed a time fuse, and the tank, balanced on the