Bosambo of the River

"What's the idea?" Coulson mopped the sweat from his forehead with a pocket-handkerchief, and turned his astonished gaze to the other.

"'Tis the loot," said Jim significantly. "We make a cache of this to-night lest a worse thing happen.

"Oh, God, this man!" prayed Coulson, appealing heavenward. "With the eyes of the whole dam' barbarian rabble directed on him, he stalks through the wilderness with his grip full of gold and his heart full of innocent guile!"

Jim refilled his pipe leisurely from a big, leather pouch that hung at his waist before he replied. "Coulson," he said between puffs, "in the language of that ridiculous vaudeville artiste we saw before we quit London, you may have brains in your head, but you've got rabbit's blood in your feet. There's no occasion for getting scared, only I surmise that one of your fellow-countrymen will be prowling around here long before the bows of out stately craft take the water like a thing of life, and since he is the Lord High Everything in this part of the world, and can turn out a man's pocket without so much as a 'damn ye,' I am for removing all trace of the Frenchi Creed River diggings."

Coulson had paused in his work, and sat squatting on his heels, his eyes fixed steadily on his partner's. He was a good-looking young man of twenty-seven, a few years the junior of the other, whose tanned face was long and thin, but by no means unpleasant.

"What does it matter?" asked Coulson after a while. "He can only ask where we got the dust, and we needn't tell him; and if we do we've got enough here to keep us in comfort all our days."

Jim smiled.

"Suppose he holds this gold?" he asked quietly. "Suppose he just sends his spies along to discover where the river digging is – and suppose he finds it is in French territory and that there is a prohibitive export duty from the French country. Oh! there's a hundred suppositions, and they're all unpleasant."

Coulson rose stiffly.

"I think we'll take the risk of the boat foundering, Jim," he said. "Put the grip back."

Jim hesitated, then with a nod he swung the portmanteau aboard and followed. A few minutes later he was doubled up in the perfectly inadequate space of No. 1 hold, swabbing out the ooze of the river, and singing in a high falsetto the love song of a mythical Bedouin.

It was past midnight when the two men, tired, aching, and cheerful, sought their beds.

"If Sanders turns up," shouted Jim as he arranged his mosquito curtain (the shouting was necessary, since he was addressing his companion through a matchboard partition between the two cabins), "you've got to lie, Coulson."

"I hate lying," grumbled Coulson loudly; "but I suppose we shall have to?"

"Betcher!" yawned the other, and said his prayers with lightning rapidity.

Daylight brought dismay to the two voyagers.

The hole in the hull was not alone responsible for the flooded hold. There was a great gash in her keel – the plate had been ripped away by some snag or snags unknown. Coulson looked at Jim, and Jim returned the despairing gaze.

"A canoe for mine," said Jim after a while. "Me for the German river and so home. That is the way I intended moving, and that is the way I go."

Coulson shook his head.

"Flight!" he said briefly. "You can explain being in Sanders's territory, but you can't explain the bolt – stick it out!"

All that morning the two men laboured in the hot sun to repair the damage. Fortunately the cement was enough to stop up the bottom leak, and there was enough over to make a paste with twigs and sun-dried sand to stop the other. But there was no blinking the fact that the protection afforded was of the frailest. The veriest twig embedded in a sandbank would be sufficient to pierce the flimsy "plating." This much the two men saw when the repairs were completed at the end of the day. The hole in the bow could only be effectively dealt with by the removal of one plate and the substitution of another, "and that," said Jim, "can hardly happen."

The German river was eighty miles upstream and a flooded stream that ran five knots an hour at that. Allow a normal speed of nine knots to the tiny Grasshopper, and you have a twenty hours' run at best.

"The river's full of floatin' timber," said Jim wrathfully, eyeing the swift sweep of the black waters, "an' we stand no better chance of gettin' anywhere except to the bottom; it's a new plate or nothing."

Thus matters stood with a battered Grasshopperhigh and dry on the shelving beach of the Akasava village, and two intrepid but unhappy gold smugglers discussing ways and means, when complications occurred which did much to make the life of Mr. Commissioner Sanders unbearable.

* * * * *

There was a woman of the Akasava who bore the name of Ufambi, which means a "bad woman." She had a lover – indeed, she had many, but the principal was a hunter named Logi. He was a tall, taciturn man, and his teeth were sharpened to two points. He was broad-shouldered, his hair was plastered with clay, and he wore a cloak that was made from the tails of monkeys. For this reason he was named Logi N'kemi, that is to say, Logi the Monkey.

He had a hut far in the woods, three days' journey, and in this wood were several devils; therefore he had few visitors.

Ufambi loved this man exceedingly, and as fervently hated her husband, who was a creature of Ofesi. Also, he was not superior to the use of the stick.

One day Ufambi annoyed him and he beat her. She flew at him like a wild cat and bit him, but he shook her off and beat her the more, till she ran from the hut to the cool and solitary woods, for she was not afraid of devils.

Here her lover found her, sitting patiently by the side of the forest path, her well-moulded arms hugging her knees, her chin sunk, a watchful, brooding and an injured woman.

They sat together and talked, and the woman told him all there was to be told, and Logi the Monkey listened in silence.

"Furthermore," she went on, "he has buried beneath the floor of the hut certain treasures given to him by white men, which you may take."

She said this pleadingly, for he had shown no enthusiasm in the support of her plan.

"Yet how can I kill your husband," said Logi, carefully, "and if I do kill him and Sandi comes here, how may I escape his cruel vengeance? I think it would be better if you gave him death in his chop, for then none would think evilly of me."

She was not distressed at his patent selfishness. It was understandable that a man should seek safety for himself, but she had no intention of carrying out her lover's plan.

She returned to her husband, and found him so far amiable that she escaped a further beating. Moreover, he was communicative.

"Woman," he said, "to-morrow I go a long journey because of certain things I have seen, and you go with me. In a secret place, as you know, I have hidden my new canoe, and when it is dark you shall take as much fish and my two little dogs and sit in the canoe waiting for me."

"I will do this thing, lord," she said meekly.

He looked at her for a long time.

"Also," he said after a while, "you shall tell no man that I am leaving, for I do not desire that Sandi shall know, though," he added, "if all things be true that Ofesi says, he will know nothing."

"I will do this as you tell me, lord," said the woman.

He rose from the floor of the hut where he had been squatting and went out of the hut.

"Come!" he said graciously, and she followed him to the beach and joined the crowd of villagers who watched two white men labouring under difficulties.

By and by she saw her husband detach himself from the group and make his cautious way to where the white men were.

Now Bikilari – such was the husband's name – was a N'gombi man, and the N'gombi folk are one of two things, and more often than not, both. They are either workers in iron or thieves, and Jim, looking up at the man, felt a little spasm of satisfaction at the sight of the lateral face marks which betrayed his nationality.

"Ho, man!" said Jim in the vernacular, "what are you that you stand in my sun?"

"I am a poor man, lord," said Bikilari, "and I am the slave of all white men: now I can do things which ignorant men cannot, for I can take iron and bend it by heat, also I can bend it without heat, as my fathers and my tribe have done since the world began."

Coulson watched the man keenly, for he was no lover of the N'gombi.

"Try him out, Jim," he said, so they gave Bikilari a hammer and some strips of steel, and all the day he worked strengthening the rotten bow of the Grasshopper.

In the evening, tired and hungry, he went back to his hut for food; but his wife had watched him too faithfully for his comfort, and the cooking-pot was cold and empty. Bikilari beat her with his stick, and for two hours she sobbed and blew upon the embers of the fire alternately whilst my lord's fish stewed and spluttered over her bent head.