A dead white face. She wore a silk nightdress, rather high to the throat…

And she spoke.

“Won’t you wait until the nurse comes back, Nick? I don’t think I ought to drink ice-water–the doctor..”

“Damn the doctor!” said Nickerson Haben between his teeth, and the three men heard him, saw his hand go up holding an imaginary glass, saw his eyes fall to the level of an imaginary pillow.

“I’m sick of you–sick of you! Make a new will, eh? Like hell!”

He stared and stared, and then slowly turned his drawn face to Sanders.

“My wife”–he pointed to space and mumbled the words–“I–I killed her–“

And then he realised that he was Nickerson Haben, Under-Secretary of State, and these were three very unimportant officials–and a black woman who was regarding him gravely. But this discovery of his was just the flash of a second too late.

“Go to your room, sir,” said Sanders, and spent the greater part of the night composing a letter to the Foreign Secretary.

II. THE CLEAN SWEEPER

The soldiers of the old king who lives beyond the mountains came down into the Ochori country and took back with them ten women and forty goats–and this was the year of the sickness, when goats were very valuable. And a week later they came again, and in yet another week they repeated the raid.

Mr. Commissioner Sanders sent an urgent message into the old king’s country and journeyed to the Ochori to meet the old man’s envoy…

On a certain day, over the northern hills came Buliki, chief minister of the great king K’salugu–M’pobo, and he came with great hauteur, with four and sixty spearmen for his escort, and each spearman wore the leopard skin of the royal service–that is to say, a leopard skin with three monkey tails, signifying the swiftness, the ferocity and the agility of these men. He boasted that he was the fortieth of his house who had sat in the royal kraal and had given the law.

Sanders, with a more modest escort, waited in the city of the Ochori for the coming of this mission, which was two days late and was even now arriving, not at dawn as had been faithfully promised, but in the heat of the day. Sanders sat cross-legged on his canvas chair, chewing an unsmoked cigar and drawing little patterns with his ebony stick on the sand.

Behind him, tall and straight, his bare, brown back rippling with muscles with every movement, was Bosambo, chief and king of the Ochori folk north and south.

Behind the shelter which had been erected to serve as a palaver house was a section of Houssas, brownfaced men in blue tunics, handling their rifles with an easy familiarity which was very awe-inspiring to the dense mob of the Ochori people who had come to witness this memorable meeting.

Sanders said no word, realising that this was not the moment for confidences, and that in all probability Bosambo was quite as wise as he himself on the matter of the great king’s delinquencies. For north of the hills was territory which was as yet independent, and acknowledged no government and no king beside its own.

Whether this was to remain so did not depend entirely upon the result of the interview, for no man knew better than Sanders that nothing short of four battalions could force the passes of the great mountains, and war was very unpopular with the British Government just about then.

The royal guard which the king had sent as escort to his minister wheeled on to the big square and formed a line facing Sanders, and the Houssas regarded them with the peculiar interest which soldiers have for possible casualties. Buliki was a big man, broad, tall and stout. He swaggered up to the palaver house without any evidence that he was impressed by the importance of the man he was to meet.

“I see you, white man,” he said in the Bomongo tongue, which runs for six hundred miles to the north and the west of the Territories.

“I see you, black man,” replied Sanders. “What message do you bring from your master?”

“Lord,” said the man insolently, “my master has no message for you, only this: that whilst he rules his land he knows no other king than his own beautiful impulse and has no other law but the law he gives.”

“Oh, ko’.” said Sanders sardonically. “He must have a very powerful ju-ju to talk so boldly, and you, Buliki, have surely the stomach of a lion–for hereabouts I am the law, and men who speak to me in the tone of a master I hang out of hand.”

His tone was bleak and cold, and his blue eyes strayed unconsciously to the high tree before the palaver place.

Buliki, who knew nothing of the sacred character of an embassy, went grey under his tawny skin and shuffled his feet.

“Lord,” he pleaded, in a different voice, “I am a tired man, having come this day across the Mountain of the Cold White Powder that Melts. Therefore be gentle to me, a poor chief, who does not know the ways of white men.”

“Go back to your master, Buliki, and speak this way: Sandi, who sits for his king on the great river, desires that no soldiers may come again from the king’s territory to raid the women and goats of the Ochori. For I am a man quick to kill, and no respecter of kings or chiefs. I have ploughed little kings into the ground and the crops of my people have flourished on the bones of princes. Where is M’balogini, who brought his spears against me? He is dead and his house has rotted with the rains. Where is Kobolo, the N’gombi warrior who took his young men into battle against me? You will search the forest for his city, and his spirit weeps on the great mountain. Little kings are my meat: how mighty are they in the house of their wives! How small are they when I bring them in irons to my great ship! Go back to the old king and say this: The chief or soldier of his who comes this side of the Ghost Mountains shall be slaves for my people and be glad they are alive. The palaver is finished.”

After the embassy had departed…

“Dam’ nigger!” said Bosambo, who was blacker than a spade suit but had the advantage of a Christian education. “Silly ass!…”

Then, in his own language, for Sanders did not favour Coast English: “Lord, this old king is very cunning, and there sits in the shadow of his hut a white man who knows the ways of white lords.”

“The devil there is!” said Sanders in surprise, for this was news to him, that Joe had gone that way.

Up in the old king’s country Buliki, prostrate and on his face before the wizened old man, told the story of his embassy, and the king listened, stroking his thin, frizzly beard.

Joe the Trader (he had no other name) listened too, and had parts of the message translated to him.

“Tell the old man,” he said to his interpreter, “that all that stuff is bunk! Say, Sanders ain’t got no soldiers more’n fifty! Tell him that if he sends down to headquarters an’ complains ’bout these threats, Sanders’ll get it in the neck–not allowed to do that sort of thing.”

Joe, in his semi-sober moments, was an authority on what may be described as the unwritten laws of the wild. He had tramped up and down Africa from the Zambesi to the Lado, and he had learnt a lot. There wasn’t a lock-up from Charter to Dakka that had not housed him. He had traded arms and gin for ivory in the days of Bula Matadi, and had drifted now to the one sanctuary where the right arm of any law could not reach him.

Of all the men in the world he hated best Mr. Sanders. He had good reason for his antipathy, for Sanders flogged the sellers of gin, and hanged even white gentlemen who purveyed Belgian firearms to the unsophisticated and bloodthirsty aborigines.

“Here!…” Joe was excited at the idea. “Tell him to send for Sanders to a great palaver–somewhere up the Ghosts–you’d get him coming up that road…”

This plan was duly translated. The old king’s dull eyes lit up and he rubbed his hands, for he had sworn to stretch upon his new war-drum the skin of the man who harassed him–and the drum’s case had grown warped and cracked in the years of waiting.

“That is good talk,” said a counsellor unfavourable to the king’s white guest; “but it is well known that Sandi goes unharmed through terrible dangers because of M’shimba-M’shamba, the fearful spirit. They say that great regiments of devils march with him shrieking so that, where he has passed, the leopards lie dead with fright.”

The old king was impressed, and licked the four fingers of his right hand so that no evil could touch him.

“Stuff!” said Joe loudly. “Ghosts–stuff! You’ll get him good an’ then these birds won’t come stickin’ their noses over the mountains no more…”

The king listened, straining his neck towards the interpreter.

“Man, this shall be,” he said, and Buliki was bidden to rise.

Just as the years of Old Egypt found themselves identified with the transient periods of kings, so was there a chronology of the river which has its significant association with a certain Lieutenant Tibbetts of the King’s Houssas. Up at Headquarters, the heads of little departments still speak of the Second Year of Bones as marking the process of a dynasty.

It was an annus mirabilis from causes which, in the main, had nothing whatever to do with Bones, as Hamilton of the Houssas had christened this lank subaltern.

Sanders (1926)

Nor had it to do with the wonders which he worked by land and flood. Nor, exactly and truthfully, could it be said that he had any notable influence on the fecund soil which that year produced the most amazing of all harvests.