Bones Part 18

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 telegram.

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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sistance 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 s...o...b..ll 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 again 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 Ochori 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.

[Footnote 4: The stone breaker, the native name for the Congo Government.]

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]