Bones of the River by Edgar Wallace Page A

this is a wise saying of the Akasava: ‘No man turns his face to the sun or his back to his wife.’ The palaver is finished.”
    He saw Bosambo in the privacy of his hut, and the interview was brief.
    “Bosambo, you shall neither maim nor kill, nor shall you put other people to shame. If these men hunt in your forest, do you not fish in their waters? They tell me, too, that you take your spears to the Akasava country and clear their woods of meat. This is my word, that you shall not again go into their hunting-grounds, until they come to yours.”
    “Oh ko!” said Bosambo in dismay; for the taboo which had been put upon him was the last he desired.
    Bosambo had an affection for a kind of wild duck that could only be trapped in the Akasava marshes, and the deprivation was a serious one.
    “Lord,” he said, “I have repented in my heart, being a Christian, the same as you, and being well acquainted with Marki, Luki and Johnny, and other English lords. Let the Akasava come to my forest, and I will go to their lands to catch little birds. For, lord, I did not hurt these Akasava men, merely burning them in play, thinking they would laugh.”
    Sanders did not smile. “Men do not laugh when they are so burnt,” he said, and refused to lift the embargo.
    “If they come to you, you may go to them,” he said at parting.
    For the greater part of three months Bosambo was Tempter. He withdrew his spies from the forest, he sent secret word to the Akasava king, inviting him to great hunts; he conveyed taunts and threats calculated to arouse all that was warlike in his bosom, but the Akasava king rejected the overtures and returned insult for insult. And Bosambo brooded on roast duck and grew morose.
    Then on a day Sanders had a message from one of his spies who kept a watchful eye upon the people of the Akasava. And there was need for watchfulness, apart from the trouble with Bosambo, for it had been a year of record crops, and when the crops are plentiful and goats multiply in the Akasava country, and men grow rich in a season, and are relieved for the moment of the strain which judiciously applied taxation and the stubbornness of the soil impose, their minds turn to spears, and to the ancient stories of Akasava valour which the old men tell and the young maidens sing. And they are apt, in their pride, to look around for new enemies, or to furbish old grievances. For this is the way of all peoples, primitive or civilised, that prosperity and idleness are the foundations of all mischief.
    Cala cala , which means long ago, the N’gombi people, who were wonderful workers of iron, had stolen a bedstead of solid brass, bequeathed to the king of the Akasava by a misguided missionary, who in turn had received it from as misguided a patron. And this bedstead of brass was an object of veneration and awe for twenty years; and then, in a little war which raged for the space of three moons between the Akasava and the N’gombi, the Akasava city had been taken and sacked, and the bed of brass had gone across the river into the depths of the forest, and there, by cunning N’gombi hands, had reappeared in the shape of bowls and rings and fine-drawn wire of fabulous value. For any object of metal is an irresistible attraction to the craftsmen of the forest – did not Sanders himself lose a steel anvil from the lower deck of the Zaire ? The story of how ten men swam across the river, carrying that weight of metal, is a legend of N’gombi.
    The true city of these people is situated two days’ march in the forest; and hither, one fine morning, came messengers from the king of the Akasava – four haughty men, wearing feathers in their hair and leopard skins about their middle, and each man carrying a new shield and a bunch of bright killing spears, which the N’gombi eyed with professional interest.
    “O king, I see you,” said the chief envoy, one M’guru. “I am from your master, the king and lord of the Akasava, who, as you know, are