Bosambo of the River

"When you come back," he said, "I will speak on the matter of these roads. Tell me now, my friend, how long do you stay with the Isisi?"

"Lord," said Ikifari, "I stay for the time of a moon. Afterwards I go back to the Ochori, bearing rich presents which my lord Bosambo has made me swear I will keep for myself."

"The space of a moon," repeated Sanders.

He turned to ring the engines "Ahead" and did not see Emberi's hand go up to cover a smile.

CHAPTER XIII

GUNS IN THE AKASAVA

"Thank God!" said the Houssa captain fervently, "there is no war in this country."

"Touch wood!" said Sanders, and the two men simultaneously reached out and laid solemn hands upon the handle of the coffee-pot, which was vulcanite.

If they had touched wood who knows what might have happened in the first place to Ofesi the chief of Mc-Canti?

Who knows what might have happened to the two smugglers of gold from the French territory?

The wife of Bikilini might have gone off with her lover, and Bikilini resigned and patient taken another to wife, and the death men of the Ofesi might never have gone forth upon their unamiable missions, or going forth have been drowned, or grown faint-hearted.

Anyway it is an indisputable fact that neither Sanders nor Captain Hamilton touched wood on the occasion.

And as to Bannister Fish – ?

That singular man was a trader in questionable commodities, for he had not the nice sentiments which usually go with the composition of a white man.

Some say that he ran slaves from Angola to places where a black man or a black woman is worth a certain price; that he did this openly with the connivance of the Government of Portugal and made a tolerable fortune. He certainly bought more poached ivory than any man in Africa, and his crowning infamy up to date was the arming of a South Soudanese Mahdi – arms for employment against his fellow-countrymen.

There are certain manufacturers of small arms in the Midlands who will execute orders to any capacity, produce weapons modern or antiquated at a cost varying with the delicacy or mechanism of the weapon. They have no conscience, but have a hard struggle to pay dividends because there are other firms in Liége who run the same line of business, but produce at from 10 per cent. to 25 per cent. lower cost.

Mr. Bannister Fish, a thin, wiry man of thirty-four, as yellow as a guinea and with the temper of a fiend, was not popular on the coast, especially with officials. Fortunately Africa has many coasts, and since Africa in mass was Mr. Fish's hunting-ground, rather than any particular section, the coast men – as we know the coast – saw little of him.

It was Mr. Fish's boast that there was not twenty miles of coast line from Dakka to Capetown, and from Lourenço Marques to Suez, that had not contributed something of beauty to his lordly mansion on the top of Highgate Hill.

You will observe that he omits reference to the coast which encloses Cape Colony, and there is a reason. Cape Colony is immensely civilised, has stipendiary magistrates and a horrible breakwater where yellow-jacketed convicts labour for their sins, and Mr. Fish's sins were many. He tackled Sanders's territory in the same spirit as a racehorse breeder will start raising Pekingese poodles – not for the money he could make out of it, but as an amusing sideline.

He worked ruin on the edge of the Akasava country, operating from the adjoining foreign territories, and found an unholy joy in worrying Sanders, whom he had met once and most cordially disliked.

His dislike was intensified on the next occasion of their meeting, for Sanders, making a forced march across the Akasava, seized the caravan of Mr. Bannister Fish, burnt his stores out of hand, and submitted the plutocrat of Highgate Hill to the indignity of marching handcuffed to headquarters. Mr. Fish was tried by a divisional court and fined £500, or, as an alternative, awarded twelve months imprisonment with hard labour.

The fine was paid, and Mr. Fish went home saying horrible things about Mr. Commissioner Sanders, which I will not sully these fair pages by repeating.

Highgate Hill is a prosaic neighbourhood served by prosaic motor-buses, and not the place where one would imagine wholesale murder might be planned, yet from his domain in Highgate Mr. Fish issued certain instructions by telephone and cablegram, and at his word men went secretly into Sanders's territory looking for the likely man.

They found Ofesi, and Highgate spoke to the Akasava to some purpose.

In the month of February in a certain year Mr. Fish drove resplendently in his electric landau from Highgate to Waterloo. He arrived on the Akasava border seven weeks later no less angry with Sanders than he had ever been, and of a cheerful countenance because, being a millionaire, he could indulge in his hobbies, and his hobby was the annoyance of a far-away Commissioner who, at that precise moment was touching vulcanite and thinking it wood.

Ofesi, the son of Malaka, the son of G'nani, was predestined.

Thus it was predicted by the famous witch-doctor Komonobologo, of the Akasava.

For it would appear that on the night that Ofesi came squealing into the world, there were certain solar manifestations such as an eclipse of the moon and prodigious shooting of stars, which Komonobologo translated favourably to the clucking, sobbing and shrill whimpering morsel of whitey-brown humanity.

Thus Ofesi was to rule all peoples as far as the sun shone (some three hundred miles in all directions according to local calculations), and he should not suffer ignominious death at the hand of any man.

Ofesi (literally "the Born-Lucky") should be mighty in counsel and in war; should shake the earth with the tread of his legions; might risk and gain, never risk and lose; was the favoured of ju-jus and ghosts; and would have many sons.

The hollow-eyed woman stretched on the floor of the hut spoke faintly of her happiness, the baby with greedy mouth satisfying the beast in him said nothing, being too much occupied with his natural and instinctive desires.

Such prophecies are common, and some come to nothing. Some, for no apparent reason, stick fest to the recipients.

Ofesi – his destiny – was of the sticking kind.

When Sanders took up his duties on the river, Ofesi was a lank and awkward youth of whom his fellows stood in awe.

Sanders was in awe of nobody. He listened quietly to the recital of portents, omens, and the like, and when it was finished, he delivered a little homily on the fallibility of human things and the extraordinarily high death-rate which existed amongst those misguided people who walked outside the rigid circle of the land.

Ofesi had neighbours more hearty than Sanders, and by these he was accepted as something on account of the total wonder which the years would produce.

So Ofesi grew and flourished, doing much mischief in his way, which was neither innocent nor boyish, and the friendly hand which is upraised to small boys all the world over never fell sharply upon his well-covered nerves, because Ofesi was predestined and immune.

In course of time he was appointed by the then king of the Akasava to the chieftainship of the village of Mi-lanti, and the city of the Akasava breathed a sigh of relief to see his canoe go round the bend of the river out of sight.

No report of the chief's minor misdoings came to Sanders because this legend of destiny carried to all the nations save and except one.

It is said that Ofesi received more homage and held a more regal court in his tiny principality than did the king his master; that N'gombi, Isisi, and the tribes about sent him presents doubly precious, and that he had a household of sixty wives, all contributed by his devotees. It was also said that he made the intoxicating distributions of Mr. Fish possible, but Sanders had no proof of this.

He raided his friends impartially, did all manner of unpleasant things, terrorised the river from the Lesser Isisi to the edge of the Ochori, and the fishermen watching his war canoes creeping stealthily through the night would say: "Let no man see the lord Ofesi; lest in the days to come he remember and blind us."

Whether from sheer cunning or from the intuitive faculty which is a part of genius, Ofesi grew to stout manhood without once violating the border line of the Ochori.

Until upon a day —

Sanders came in great haste one wet April night when the clouds hung so low over the river that you might have touched them with a fishing-rod.

It was a night of billowing mists, of drenching cloud bursts, of loud cracking thunders and the flicker-flacker of lightning so incessant that only the darkness counted as interval.

Yet, against the swollen stream, drenched to the skin, his wet face set to the stinging rain and the white rod of his searchlight piercing such gloom as there was, Sanders came as fast as stern wheel could revolve for the Akasava land.

He came up to the village of Mi-lanti in the wild grey of a stormy dawn, and such of the huts as the flooding waters of the heavens had spared stood isolated sentinels amidst smoking ruins.

He landed tired and immensely angry, and found many dead men and one or two who thought they were dead. They told him a doleful story of rapine and murder, of an innocent village set upon by the Ochori and taken in its defencelessness. "That is a lie," said Sanders promptly, "for you have stockades, built to the west of the village and your dead are all painted as men paint themselves who prepare long for war. Also the Ochori – such as I have seen – are not so painted, which tells me that they came in haste against a warring people."

The wounded man turned his tired face to Sanders.

"It is my faith," he said, in the conventional terminology of his tribe, "that you have eyes like a big cat."