Bones

by Edgar Wallace

  “Beyond selling me one of your beastly sweepstake tickets for five shillings,” said Hamilton, unpleasantly, “a ticket which I dare say you have taken jolly good care will not win a prize, I fail to see in what manner you have helped me. Now, Bones, you will have to pay more attention to your work. There is no sense in slacking; we will have Sanders back here before we know where we are, and when he starts nosing round there will be a lot of trouble. Besides, you are shirking.”

  “Me!” gasped Bones, outraged. “Me – shirking? You forget yourself, sir!”

  Even Bones could not be dignified with a lather brush in one hand and a half-shaven cheek, testifying to the hastiness of his departure from his quarters.

  “I only wish to say, sir,” said Bones, “that during the period I have had the honour to serve under your command I have settled possibly more palavers of a distressingly ominous character than the average Commissioner is called upon to settle in the course of a year.”

  “As you have created most of the palavers yourself,” said Hamilton, unkindly, “I do not deny this. In other words, you have got yourself into more tangles, and you’ve had to crawl out more often.”

  “It is useless appealing to your better nature, sir,” said Bones.

  He saluted with the hand that held the lather brush, turned about like an automaton, tripped over the mat, recovered himself with an effort, and preserving what dignity a man can preserve in pink-striped pyjamas and a sun helmet, stalked majestically back to his quarters. Half-way across he remembered something and came doubling back, clattering into Hamilton’s room unceremoniously.

  “There is one thing I forgot to say,” he said, “about those sweepstake tickets. If I happen to be killed on any future expedition that you may send me, you will understand that the whole of my movable property is yours, absolutely. And I may add, sir,” he said at the doorway with one hand on the lintel ready to execute a strategic flank movement out of range, “that with this legacy I offer you my forgiveness for the perfectly beastly time you have given me. Good morning, sir.”

  There was a commanding officer’s parade of Houssas at noon. It was not until he stalked across the square and clicked his heels together as he reported the full strength of his company present that Hamilton saw his subordinate again.

  The parade over, Bones went huffily to his quarters.

  He was hurt. To be told he had been shirking his duty touched a very tender and sensitive spot of his.

  In preparation for the movement which he had expected to make he had kept his company on the move for a fortnight. For fourteen terrible days in all kinds of weather, he had worked like a native in the forest; with sham fights and blank cartridge attacks upon imaginary positions, with scaling of stockades and building of bridges – all work at which his soul revolted – to be told at the end he had shirked his work!

  Certainly he had come down to headquarters more often perhaps than was necessary, but then he was properly interested in the draw of a continental sweepstake which might, with any kind of luck, place him in the possession of a considerable fortune. Hamilton was amiable at lunch, even communicative at dinner, and for him rather serious.

  For if the truth be told he was desperately worried. The cause was, as it had often been with Sanders, that French–German–Belgian territory which adjoins the Ochori country. All the bad characters, not only the French of the Belgian Congo, but of the badly-governed German lands – all the tax resisters, the murderers, and the criminals of every kind, but the lawless contingents of every nation, formed a floating nomadic population in the tree-covered hills which lay beyond the country governed by Bosambo.

  Of late there had been a larger break-away than usual. A strong force of rebellious natives was reported to be within a day’s march of the Ochori boundary. This much Hamilton knew. But he had known of such occurrences before; not once, but a score of times had alarming news come from the French border.

  He had indeed made many futile trips into the heart of the Ochori country.

  Forced marches through little known territory, and long and tiring waits for the invader that never came, had dulled his senses of apprehension. He had to take a chance. The Administrator’s office would warn him from time to time, and ask him conventionally to make his arrangements to meet all contingencies and Sanders would as conventionally reply that the condition of affairs on the Ochori border was engaging his most earnest attention.

  “What is the use of worrying about it now?” asked Bones at dinner.

  Hamilton shook his head.

  “There was a certain magic in old Sanders’ name,” he said.

  Bones’ lips pursed.

  “My dear old chap,” he said, “there is a bit of magic in mine.”

  “I have not noticed it,” said Hamilton.

  “I am getting awfully popular as a matter of fact,” said Bones complacently. “The last time I was up the river, Bosambo came ten miles down stream to meet me and spend the day.”

  “Did you lose anything?” asked Hamilton ungraciously.

  Bones thought.

  “Now you come to mention it,” he said slowly, “I did lose quite a lot of things, but dear old Bosambo wouldn’t play a dirty trick on a pal. I know Bosambo.”

  “If there is one thing more evident than another,” said Hamilton, “it is that you do not know Bosambo.”

  Hamilton was wakened at three in the next morning by the telegraph operator. It was a “clear the line” message, coded from headquarters, and half awake he went into Sanders’ study and put it into plain English.

  “Hope you are watching the Ochori border,” it ran, “representations from French Government to the effect that a crossing is imminent.”

  He pulled his mosquito boots on over his pyjamas, struggled into a coat and crossed to Lieutenant Tibbetts’ quarters.

  Bones occupied a big hut at the end of the Houssa lines, and Hamilton woke him by the simple expedient of flashing his electric hand-lamp in his face.

  “I have had a telegram,” he said, and Bones leapt out of bed wide awake in an instant.

  “I knew jolly well I would draw a horse,” he said exultantly. “I had a dream–”

  “Be serious, you feather-minded devil.”

  With that Hamilton handed him the telgram.

  Bones read it carefully, and interpreted any meanings into its construction which it could not possibly bear.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “There is only one thing to do,” said Hamilton. “We shall have to take all the men we can possibly muster, and go north at daybreak.”

  “Spoken like a jolly old Hannibal,” said Bones heartily, and smacked his superior on the back. A shrill bugle call aroused the sleeping lines, and Hamilton went back to his quarters to make preparations for the journey. In the first grey light of dawn he flew three pigeons to Bosambo, and the message they carried about their red legs was brief.

  Take your fighting regiments to the edge of Frenchi land; presently I will come with my soldiers and support you. Let no foreigner pass on your life and on your head.

  When the rising sun tipped the tops of the palms with gold, and the wild world was filled with the sound of the birds, the Zaire, her decks alive with soldiers, began her long journey northward.

  Just before the boat left, Hamilton received a further message from the Administrator. It was in plain English, some evidence of Sir Robert Sanleigh’s haste.

  Confidential: This matter on the Ochori border extremely delicate. Complete adequate arrangements to keep in touch with me.

  For one moment Hamilton conceived the idea of leaving Bones behind to deal with the telegram and come along. A little thought, however, convinced him of the futility of this method. For one thing he would want every bit of assistance he could get, and although Bones had his disadvantages he was an excellent soldier, and a loyal and gallant comrade.

  It might be necessary for Hamilton to divide up his forces; in which case he could hardly
dispense with Lieutenant Tibbetts, and he explained unnecessarily to Bones: “I think you are much better under my eye where I can see what you’re doing.”

  “Sir,” said Bones very seriously, “it is not what I do, it is what I think. If you could only see my brain at work–”

  “Ha, ha!” said Hamilton rudely.

  For at least three days relations were strained between the two officers. Bones was a man who admitted at regular intervals that he was unduly sensitive. He had explained this disadvantage to Hamilton at various times, but the Houssa stolidly refused to remember the fact.

  Most of the way up the river Hamilton attended to his business navigation – he knew the stream very well – whilst Bones, in a cabin which had been rigged up for him in the after part of the ship, played Patience, and by a systematic course of cheating himself was able to accomplish marvels. They found the Ochori city deserted save for a strong guard, for Bosambo had marched the day previous; sending a war call through the country.

  He had started with a thousand spears, and his force was growing in snowball fashion as he progressed through the land. The great road which Notiki, the northern chief, had started by way of punishment was beginning to take shape. Bosambo had moved with incredible swiftness.

  Too swift, indeed, for a certain Angolian-Congo robber who had headed a villainous pilgrimage to a land which, as he had predicted, flowed with milk and honey; was guarded by timorous men and mainly populated by slim and beautiful maidens. The Blue Books on this migration gave this man’s name as Kisini, but he was in fact an Angolian named Bizaro – a composite name which smacks suspiciously of Portuguese influence.

  Many times had the unruly people and the lawless bands which occupied the forest beyond the Ochori threatened to cross into British territory. But the dangers of the unknown, the awful stories of a certain white lord who was swift to avenge and monstrously inquisitive had held them. Year after year there had grown up tribes within tribes, tiny armed camps that had only this in common, that they were outside the laws from which they had fled, and that somewhere to the southward and the eastward were strong forces flying the tricolour of France or the yellow star of the Belgian Congo, ready to belch fire at them, if they so much as showed their flat noses.

  It would have needed a Napoleon to have combined all the conflicting forces, to have lulled all the mutual suspicions, and to have moulded these incompatible particles into a whole; but, Bizaro, like many another vain and ambitious man, had sought by means of a great palaver to produce a feeling of security sufficiently soothing to the nerves and susceptibilities of all elements, to create something like a nationality of these scattered remnants of the nations.

  And though he failed, he did succeed in bringing together four or five of the camps, and it was this news carried to the French Governor by spies, transmitted to Downing Street, and flashed back to the Coast, which set Hamilton and his Houssas moving; which brought a regiment of the King’s African Rifles to the Coast ready to reinforce the earlier expedition, and which (more to the point) had put Bosambo’s war drums rumbling from one end of the Ochorito to the other.

  Bizaro, mustering his force, came gaily through the sun-splashed aisles of the forest, his face streaked hideously with camwood, his big elephant spear twirled between his fingers, and behind him straggled his cosmopolitan force.

  There were men from the Congo and the French Congo; men from German lands; from Angola; wanderers from far-off Barotseland, who had drifted on to the Congo by the swift and yellow Kasai. There were hunters from the forests of far-off Bongindanga where the okapi roams. For each man’s presence in that force there was good and sinister reason, for these were no mere tax-evaders, poor, starved wretches fleeing from the rule which Bula Matadi[4] imposed. There was a blood price on almost every head, and in a dozen prisons at Boma, at Brazaville, and Equatorville, and as far south as St Paul de Loduda, there were leg-irons which had at some time or other fitted their scarred ankles.

  Now there are four distinct physical features which mark the border line between the border land and the foreign territory. Mainly the line is a purely imaginary one, not traceable save by the most delicate instruments – a line which runs through a tangle of forest.

  But the most noticeable crossing place is N’glili.[5]

  Here a little river, easily fordable, and not more than a dozen spear-lengths across flows from one wood into another. Between the two woods is a clear space of thick grass and shrub. In the spring of the year the banks of the stream are white with arum-lilies, and the field beyond, at a later period, is red with wild anemone.

  The dour fugitives on the other side of the stream have a legend that those who safely cross the “Field of Blood” – so they call the anemone-sprinkled land beyond – without so much as crushing a flower may claim sanctuary under the British flag.

  So that when Bizaro sighted the stream, and the two tall trees that flanked the ford, from afar off and said: “Today we will walk between the flowers,” he was signifying the definite character of his plans.

  “Master,” said one of the more timid of his muster, when they had halted for a rest in sight of the promised land, “what shall we do when we come to these strange places?”

  “We shall defeat all manner of men,” said Bizaro optimistically. “Afterwards they shall come and sue for peace, and they shall give us a wide land where we may build us huts and sow our corn. And they also will give us women, and we shall settle in comfort, and I will be chief over you. And, growing with the moons, in time I shall make you a great nation.”

  They might have crossed the stream that evening and committed themselves irrevocably to their invasion. Bizaro was a criminal, and a lazy man, and he decided to sleep where he was – an act fatal to the smooth performance of his enterprise, for when in the early hours of the morning he marched his horde to the N’glili river he found two thousand spears lining the opposite bank, and they were under a chief who was at once insolent and unmoved by argument.

  “O chief,” said Bosambo pleasantly, “you do not cross my beautiful flowers today.”

  “Lord,” said Bizaro humbly, “we are poor men who desire a new land.”

  “That you shall have,” said Bosambo grimly, “for I have sent my warriors to dig big holes wherein you may take your rest in this land you desire.”

  An unhappy Bizaro carried his six hundred spears slowly back to the land from whence he had come and found on return to the mixed tribes that he had unconsciously achieved a miracle. For the news of armed men by the N’glili river carried terror to these evil men – they found themselves between two enemies and chose the force which they feared least.

  On the fourth day following his interview with Bosambo, Bizaro led five thousand desperate men to the ford and there was a sanguinary battle which lasted for the greater part of the morning and was repeated at sundown.

  Hamilton brought his Houssas up in the nick of time, when one wing of Bosambo’s force was being thrust back and when Bizaro’s desperate adventurers had gained the Ochori bank. Hamilton came through the clearing, and formed his men rapidly.

  Sword in hand, in advance of the glittering bayonets, Bones raced across the red field, and after one brief and glorious mêlée the invader was driven back, and a dropping fire from the left, as the Houssas shot steadily at the flying enemy, completed the disaster to Bizaro’s force.

  “That settles that!” said Hamilton.

  He had pitched his camp on the scene of his exploit, the bivouac fires of the Houssas gleamed redly amongst the anemones.

  “Did you see me in action?” asked Bones, a little self-consciously.

  “No, I didn’t notice anything particularly striking about the fight in your side of the world,” said Hamilton.

  “I suppose you did not see me bowl over a big Congo chap?” asked Bones, carelessly, as he opened a tin of preserved tongue. “Two at once I bowled over,” he repeated.

  “What do you expect me to do?” asked Hamilton unp
leasantly. “Get up and cheer, or recommend you for the Victoria Cross or something?”

  Bones carefully speared a section of tongue from the open tin before he replied.

  “I had not thought about the Victoria Cross, to tell you the truth,” he admitted, “but if you feel that you ought to recommend me for something or other for conspicuous courage in the face of the enemy, do not let your friendship stand in the way.”

  “I will not,” said Hamilton.

  There was a little pause, then without raising his eyes from the task in hand which was at that precise moment the covering of a biscuit with a large and generous layer of marmalade, Bones went on: “I practically saved the life of one of Bosambo’s headmen. He was on the ground and three fellows were jabbing at him. The moment they saw me they dropped their spears and fled.”

  “I expect it was your funny nose that did the trick,” said Hamilton unimpressed.

  “I stood there,” Bones went on loftily ignoring the gratuitous insult, “waiting for anything that might turn up; exposed, dear old fellow, to every death-dealing missile, but calmly directing, if you will allow me to say so, the tide of battle. It was,” he added modestly, “one of the bravest deeds I ever saw.”

  He waited, but Hamilton had his mouth full of tongue sandwich.

  “If you mention me in despatches,” Bones went on suggestively.

  “Don’t worry – I shan’t,” said Hamilton.

  “But if you did,” persisted Lieutenant Tibbetts, poising his sticky biscuit, “I can only say–”

  “The marmalade is running down your sleeve,” said Hamilton. “Shut up, Bones, like a good chap.”

  Bones sighed.

  “The fact of it is, Hamilton,” he was frank enough to say, “I have been serving so far without hope of reward and scornful of honour, but now I have reached the age and the position in life where I feel I am entitled to some slight recognition to solace my declining years.”

  “How long have you been in the army?” asked Hamilton, curiously.

  “Eighteen months,” replied Bones; “nineteen months next week, and it’s a jolly long time, I can tell you, sir.”