Bones of the River

by Edgar Wallace

  His audience stared at him stonily. The miserly traits of the Northern Ochori are notorious.

  “And now I will say to you a poem of great power and magic,” said Bones, smacking his lips in anticipation. “Let all men listen…”

  A silence as of the grave fell upon his audience with the first words of his great effort. Bones closed his eyes and started. He was thoroughly enjoying himself. He heard a rustle of movement, and drew an altogether wrong conclusion as to its cause. When he opened his eyes he was alone. The little hill, which had been covered thickly with the people of the town, was deserted. Men and women were flying to the shelter of their own homes, that their ears should not be shocked by the Fearful Word.

  “Good Lord!” gasped Bones, and looked round.

  The chief and his counsellors had already disappeared. He was entirely alone. In a few moments there was nothing human in sight, and the hair at the back of his neck lifted. Bones had smelt the danger instantly.

  He drew his long-barrelled Browning from the holster at his side, felt for the spare magazine he always carried, and, pulling back the jacket of the pistol, pushed a cartridge into the chamber. Then he walked slowly down the hill. His way back to the river lay through the interminable main street of the town. Keeping to the centre of the broad road, he walked without haste, and from the dark interiors savage eyes followed him. And still there was no movement. Looking round, he glimpsed one head thrust out from an open doorway, but it was instantly withdrawn.

  He knew that nothing would happen to him while he was in the town; the danger lay in the thick woods beyond. He put up his hands and measured the distance of the sun from the horizon. He had three-quarters of an hour before night fell, and he was five and a half miles from the boat.

  It was the poem, he thought; and somehow he connected the poem with the mysterious disappearance of Busubu. Reaching the end of the village street, he walked quickly through the rank grass which separated him from the forest path.

  Whizz!

  A spear flew past him, buried itself in a tree, quivering. Bones spun round, his gun outstretched. There was nobody in sight.

  Then he broke into a run, and instantly the spears began to fall around him. He located the point of attack: it was the long grass to the left. Levelling his pistol, he fired twice, and a dark figure sprang up and fell again. This time Bones really ran.

  The path twisted and turned, with never more than a dozen straight yards; and so long as he could keep ahead of his pursuers, he was safe, for the wood was too thick for spear work. He padded on swiftly, but the sound of feet behind him grew nearer and nearer, and he stopped and turned. As he did so, the sound of the running ceased.

  Bones could not afford to wait, for he knew that the men who were following him were at that moment moving through the forest from trunk to trunk, in an attempt to outflank him. Again he ran, and this time the hunters came into view. A spear passed so close to him that it brushed his gaitered leg.

  Subconsciously he wondered how they came to miss him, for the Ochori are famous spearmen, and it was only later he learnt that the swamp demanded a live sacrifice. He turned and fired three times into the thick of his hunters and checked them for a second; then, as he thought he had reached an elbow of the path, a spear fell between his legs. He stumbled and fell, and before he could rise, they were on him. Near by was a crazy death-hut, one of the places to which the people of the town take their aged relatives when they are past work and are becoming a burden to the community. Here they die, and the wild beasts carry them to their lairs.

  “This is a bad thing you do, man,” said Bones when he recovered his breath; “for presently Sandi will come and then I think there will be many hangings.”

  He addressed the chief of Lusingi who had welcomed him less than an hour before.

  “Tibbetti, though we all hang, you must die, for you have spoken the Fearful Word that loosens the great Ghost of the Swamp, and now misfortune will come to this land, and our children will have sickness, and fire will fall on our huts. Because we are afraid, we shall take you to the swamp of the Ghost, and we shall blind you a little, and afterwards the fearful ones will have you. So sleep, Tibbetti, for when the moon comes up we must walk.”

  They had taken away his arms, but they had not bound him, and Bones sat down on the floor of the hut, his head in his hands, considering the possibilities of escape. They were few, for it seemed that every man capable of carrying a spear had left the town and had come out to hunt him. From where he sat he could see that the wood was filled with men. The prospect was not cheerful.

  Presently he saw the chief pass the entrance of the hut, and called him.

  “Tell me,” he said, “did Busubu speak the Fearful Word?”

  The chief shook his head affirmatively.

  “And thus he died, by the pool of the swamp!”

  “Lord, thus he died,” agreed the other.

  “Mystery solved!” said Bones with melancholy satisfaction.

  He had been up early that morning, and he had had an exhausting day. There was something in the suggestion which the chief had made. He was healthy and young and lived in the minute. He had hardly stretched himself upon the ground before he was asleep.

  When Bones awoke it was daylight, and he sat up quickly. Through the opening of the hut there was nobody in sight. Something hanging on the thin roof-beam caught his eye and he gasped.

  It was his belt and pistol.

  “I’m dreaming,” said Bones.

  He went blinking out into the light. At the edge of the forest path were two trees, and a man was sitting, his back to Bones, gazing interestedly at two uncomfortable figures tied very tightly to the trunks.

  “Bosambo!” called Bones sharply, and the watcher rose.

  “Lord, I came up in the night, I and my young men, and M’gula showed me the way you had gone and told me of the Fearful Word he had made you speak.”

  “He told you…?”

  Bosambo did not meet his eyes.

  “Lord Tibbetti, you have the wisdom of a snake. This they told me in the village: that you measured many things with your fine ribbon and looked at many things through your glass-that-makes-little-things-into-big-things.”

  Bones went pink.

  “Also by looking at leaves and cooking-pots and digging in the sand, and other cunning methods, you sought to find which way Busubu went. All this is very wonderful, but I am a simple man. I burnt M’gula a little, and the soles of old men are very tender…and he told me.”

  * * *

  “I knew all along that it was M’gula,” said Bones to an admiring audience. “In the first place there was a patch of black mud, dear old officer, on the foot of his bed. That showed me two things – and this is where the jolly old art of deduction comes in – it showed me that he had come a long journey and – and–”

  “That he’d been standing in mud,” said Hamilton helpfully.

  “Exactly!” said the triumphant Bones. “Where did the mud come from?”

  “From mud,” suggested Hamilton.

  Bones clicked his lips impatiently.

  “Dear old officer! Let me tell the story, please – that is, if you want to hear it.”

  “I’m afraid, Bones, you’ve been forestalled – Bosambo has sent me two very long and detailed messages,” smiled Sanders. “According to him, M’gula confessed under a primitive form of torture.”

  Only for a second was Bones nonplussed.

  “But who was it set his jolly old conscience working?” he demanded in triumph.

  THE MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH

  For the use of Mr Augustus Tibbetts, Lieutenant of Houssas, and called by all and sundry “Bones,” a hut had at one time been erected. It was a large hut, and in many ways a handsome hut, and would have accommodated 999 young officers out of a thousand. There was even a shower bath operating from a lofty barrel. But the interests of Bones were multifarious. His hobbies were many. They came and went, and in their passing left
on the shelves, in the cupboards and under the table and bed, distinct evidence of their existence. As the scientist may, by the examination of geological strata, trace the history of the world, so might an expert delving into the expensive litter of his hutment, follow Bones from the Devonian eras (represented by a passionate search for rare and remarkable stamps) through Cretaceous, Tertiary, and Quarternary strata of study and recreation.

  Another hut had been added to store his collection, and on its native-built shelves reposed old wireless sets that did not work and never had worked, volumes of self-improvers, piles of literature, thousands of samples ranging from linoleum to breakfast foods, boxes of scientific and quasi-scientific instruments (he took a correspondence course in mountain railway construction, although there were no mountains nearer than Sierra Leone), and rolls of electric flexes.

  “What an infernal junk shop!” said Hamilton appalled.

  He had come over to make a few caustic remarks about the key of the store-house which, as usual when Bones had its temporary custody, had been left all night in the door, thereby offering temptation to Hamilton’s Houssas, who were loyal but dishonest.

  “To your unscientific eyes, my dear old captain and comrade, yes,” said Bones quietly. “To my shrewd old optics, no. Everything there has its value, its raison d’être – which is a French expression that is Greek to you, dear old Ham – its – its requirability.”

  “What is this?” asked Hamilton, picking up a queer-looking object.

  “That,” said Bones without hesitation, “is an instrument used in wireless – it would take too long to explain, Ham. Unless you’ve got a groundin’ in science, dear old ignoramus, any explanation would be undecipherable–”

  “Unintelligible is the word you want,” said Hamilton, and read with difficulty the words stamped upon the steel side of the instrument. “‘Robinson’s Patent Safety Razor Strop’ – you don’t mean ‘wireless’ – you mean ‘hairless.’”

  “I wish to good gracious heavens you wouldn’t mess things about,” said Bones testily, as he fixed his monocle and glared at the unoffending strop.

  “The truth is, Bones,” said Hamilton when he reached the open and had drawn in long draughts of air with offensive ostentation, “you ought to burn all that rubbish. You’ll be breeding disease of some kind.”

  Bones closed his eyes and raised his eyebrows.

  “I am fightin’ disease, dear old layman,” he said gravely, and, going back to the hut, returned with a large wooden box. Holding this in the cross of his arm, he opened the lid and disclosed, lying between layers of cotton wool, a number of long, narrow, wooden cases.

  “Good Lord!” gasped Hamilton in dismay. “Are you going to do it?”

  Bones nodded even more gravely.

  “When did this come – Sanders told me nothing about it?”

  A faint and pitying smile dawned on the angular face of Bones.

  “There are some things which our revered old excellency never tells anybody,” he said gently. “You have surprised our secret, dear old Ham – may I ask you, as a man of honour an’ sensibility, dear old Peepin’ Tom, not to mention the fact that I have told you? I trust you.”

  Hamilton went back to the residency, and, in defiance of the demand for secrecy, mentioned his discovery.

  Mr Commissioner Sanders looked up from his work. “Vaccination lymph? Oh yes, it came this morning, and I sent it over to Bones. We may not want it, but Administration is worried about the outbreak in the French territory, and it may be necessary to inoculate the border people. Bones had better take charge – they can’t spare a doctor from HQ.”

  “God bless the lad!” said Hamilton in great relief. “I was afraid that I should be the goat.”

  Sanders nibbled the end of his penholder. “Bones has imagination, and I think he will want it when he comes to tackle the Lesser Isisi folk.”

  “He certainly is a ready liar,” admitted Hamilton.

  Government departments have a mania for labelling any man who occupies, temporarily or permanently, a post under their directions. There is this sense in the practice – an official so labelled may be easily identified by the most obtuse of clerks. He may occupy a separate drawer in a filing cabinet, and to him, by reason of his labelling, may be attached responsibilities which fall within the designation they have found for him. Sanders received a wire from headquarters – the wire had been working without interruption for a month owing to the elephants, who have a playful habit of uprooting the poles moving inland for the breeding season, and the message ran:

  “No. 79174. Administration H. Re your wire No. 531 T. Lt A Tibbetts, King’s Houssas, is appointed temporary Health Officer and Sanitary Inspector your territories, with additional pay three shillings per diem as from 4th instant until further notice. He will indent and report under letters HO and S1. Acknowledge.”

  Sanders duly acknowledged and communicated the momentous news to his subordinate. Bones received the intelligence very gravely.

  “Of course, dear old excellency, I shall do my best,” he said seriously. “The responsibility is simply fearful.”

  Thereafter, to use Hamilton’s own expressive language, life became simply Hell.

  At breakfast, Bones invariably came late, smelling strongly of disinfectant, his manner subdued, his tone severely professional.

  “Good morning, excellency…Ham – Ham!”

  “What the devil’s the matter with you?” demanded the startled Ham.

  “Have you washed your hands, dear old officer?”

  “That’s sunburn, you jackass!”

  Bones shook his head. “Use a weak solution of carbolic acid, dear old infectious one,” he murmured. “Can’t be too careful in these days.”

  He invariably carried a sheet of white paper, which he laid on the chair before he sat down, and he insisted upon a cup of boiling-hot water being placed on the table so that he might sterilise his fork and knife.

  When, one morning, Sanders came into breakfast and found the dining-room reeking with carbolic, he struck.

  “Bones, I appreciate your conscientious efforts on behalf of hygiene, but if you don’t mind, I’d rather die of disease than endure this stink.”

  “Microbes, dear old excellency,” murmured Bones. “This is stuff that makes naughty old Mike go red in the face.”

  “I prefer that he remains pale,” said Sanders, and called his orderly to open the windows.

  More annoying was the practice which Bones initiated of inspecting his superiors’ sleeping quarters. Hamilton found him in his bedroom with a tape measure and a look of profound distress.

  “Ham, old fugg-wallah, this won’t do at all!” said Bones, shaking his head reprovingly. “Bless my jolly old life and soul, you’d be dead if I hadn’t come in! How many cubic feet do you think you’ve got?”

  “I’ve got two feet,” answered the exasperated Hamilton, “and if you’re not out of this room in three twinks, I’m going to use one of them!”

  “And what’s all this?” Bones stirred a heap of clothing with the end of his stick. “Trousers, dear old thing, coats an’ hats – don’t get peevish, Ham. Us medical lads–”

  “‘Us’,” sneered Hamilton. “You illiterate hound! Get out!”

  It is very trying to be brought into daily and hourly contact with a man who smelt alternately of lysol and naphthaline. It was maddening to find dinner delayed because Bones had strolled into the kitchen and had condemned the cooking arrangements; but the culmination of his infamy came when he invented a new filter that turned the drinking water a deep, rich pink that made it taste of iron filings.

  “Can’t you telegraph to headquarters and have him reduced to the ranks, sir?” asked Hamilton savagely, after he had found crystals of pure carbolic acid in his shaving mug. “I’m being sanitised to death!”

  Happily a tax-collecting tour was due, and Sanders was not sorry. Bones, of course, ordered the thorough fumigation of the Zaire, and for three days after the
little steamer started on her voyage, the unhappy crew breathed sulphur fumes and drank sulphur water and ate sulphurated rice.

  Bones came down to the quay, a strange and awesome spectacle; a thin veil of antiseptic gauze hung from the edges of his helmet like a curtain, and on his hands were odorous gloves.

  “Hail to the bride!” snarled Hamilton from the bridge. “Where’s your orange blossom, Birdie?”

  “I order you to keep away from the Ochori,” cried Bones in a muffled voice. “There’s measles there – drink nothing but Lithia water…”

  Hamilton replied offensively.

  * * *

  There runs between the Pool of the Silent Ones and the Lesser Isisi, a strip of land which is neither forest nor swamp, and yet is of the nature of both. Here grow coarse trees that survive even the parasitical growths which shoot upward in one humid night to the height of a tall man; and here come the silent ones to sleep between trees, secure in the swamps that surround them and the guardianship of those little birds who love crocodiles and stand sentinel over them when they slumber. Of other birds there are few; other beasts do not come to the Wood of the Waters, and the elephants’ playing ground is on the firmer shore of the river. Here they have levelled the trees and stamped the earth flat, so that they may gambol and chase one another, and the calves may fight to the applause of trumpetings and waving trunks. There are many rotting huts in the Wood of the Waters, for the Isisi send here the old, the blind, and the mad, that they may die without distressing the whole and the sane. Sometimes they kill one another, but generally a scaly form creeps up from the mud and knocks them into the water with its quick tail, and there is an end.

  Mr Commissioner Sanders was mad, but not slayable, by reason of his soldiers, his long-nosed “wung-wung” (so they called his hotchkiss) and the brass-jacketted guns that said “ha-ha-ha!”

  Nobody but a madman would go squelching through the noisome mud of the wood, peering into foul huts, raking over ground for signs of skeletons (all that the crocodiles did not take was the little red ants’ by right). Yet this is what Sandi did. He slowed his fine boat and brought her to the bank.