What did it portend?
What was in the wind?
* * * *
“Fi aman ’illah!” piously mumbled the Arab, looking after the Belgian’s truculent back, and, a few minutes later, he faced his partner in his private office.
Donachie, a cigar between his teeth, his feet elevated to the heat-gangrened table which was littered with correspondence and stray bits of riding-gear, looked up as the Arab entered, and the latter sensed at once, instinctively, that if his own news were unfavorable, Mahmoud Ali Daud, too, had some to communicate that were not exactly roseate.
For they knew each other. Their partnership, through the hot, stinking, yellow African years, had grown into a thing finer and stronger than a mere business combination for the sake of profit.
A real affection had sprung up between these two men from the ends of the Earth; and though, when alone in their wattle-and-daub living house which overlooked the rush-fringed river, they quarreled freely and frequently—never about their decisions, but rather about their divergent methods of arriving at the selfsame decisions—they could read each other’s mind like an open book.
Thus it was with a lop-sided smile that James Donachie said he was willing to wager dollars to doughnuts that his own news were fully as bad as his friend’s, and he pointed at a blue cable-slip.
“Came shortly after you left, Mahmoud,” he said, “I’ve decoded it.”
The other read.
It said, courteously, lyingly, and expensively, at four and sixpence a word, that the London & Union Bank regretted exceedingly, et cetera; but that in the matter of the three months’ unsecured loan of thirty thousand pounds sterling, though they knew that they agreed to it three days back, though they realized the un-businesslike methods, et cetera, still, given certain unforeseen conditions of the market, et cetera, they would be greatly obliged if, et cetera. If Double-Dee had already drawn on the loan, such amounts would be transferred to the current account—and then a few more hypocritical and expensive et ceteras.
“Rats leaving the sinking ship,” commented the Scot.
“Yes,” agreed the Arab, “and sharks waiting below in the black, swirling waters, for the ship to turn turtle—to gorge themselves with flesh. One sharp especially! Blunt-nosed! Cruel! Most evil! A Belgian shark!”—and he told his friend about the meeting with Baron Adrien de Roubaix.
“In other words,” said Donachie, “the gentry of the Chartered Company have found out about what’s been going on up there in the Waranga country”—he pointed through the window, to the east, where the land rose slowly, then, suddenly, curved fantastically and raced away to a tight, pigeon-blue sky—“and they are at the back of this”—indicating the cablegram.
“Perhaps not exactly at the back of it,” replied the Arab.
“No?”
“No. Rather”—Mahmoud Ali Daud lowered his voice—“in front of it!”
“Which—translated into less metaphorical English—is s’posed to mean what?”
“Just an idea of mine thrown out! Just a soft-footed, groping suspicion—a feeling—an instinct—that the Chartered Company did not have to hear about what happened to us in the hinterland.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that it was the company which caused the—ah—accidents—call them what you wish—which, in their turn, caused the news and led to the curtailing of our credit in London—which may lead, if Fate be harsh and our own flesh not strong enough, to the end of Double-Dee.”
Donachie shook his head.
“No, no,” he said. “I have no call to break a lance for that Chartered gang. Still—it’s impossible—impossible, man!”
“Nothing is impossible in the eye of Allah,” said the Arab. “When the impossible happens, it is seen—a stone swims in the water—a feather breaks the back of a full-grown man—an ape sings a love song—and once I met an honest Greek!”
The other made a weary gesture.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Very pretty little metaphors. But—why—we carried right on with Navarro d’Albani’s scheme—we’ve stopped every hole—sealed the whole darned hinterland up as hermetically as—”
“We thought we had. And yet the facts of the case remain—three graves up yonder in the bush, heart of my heart—and the baron knows—and smiles!”
“Even so—even suppose he found out, somehow—why—what you accuse him of—”
“I do not accuse. I suspect.”
“I know your way of suspecting. And—no—the Chartered Company—they would not stoop to—”
“Murder—since, doubtless, it was murder?”
“Exactly!”
“And why not, little brother? Wah!” And there was in the Arab’s words all the sordid heart of the scabbed, festering Black Lands—“this is Africa, Africa! The graveyard of the white man’s decencies! The land of the cursed, thin-shanked, flat-footed seed of Ham! Why not murder then? You yourself—look back into your own life as Africa made you live it. And I—when I think of the past years and the past sins—of—oh—things—May the Prophet intercede for me on the Day of Judgment!”
“Yes,” admitted Donachie. “I—I have taken life—but—not for gain—for the sake of profit—”
And the next moment, not with clean-cut suddenness, high-stepping, sharply silhouetted, but matter-of-fact, drab, not as the unexpected but as the ever-to-be-expected—bitter, startling news drifted in, on the lips of a short, bow-legged Zanzibaree half-breed, Shareef Ansar, still white as a leper with the dust of the long trek, his eyes burning deep in their sockets with the fatigues of the wilderness pull, his thatch of rough, bristly hair bleached blotchy-red by the merciless sun of the hinterland.
“DuPlessis!” Shareef Ansar whispered, as he stumbled across the threshold. And he shivered and stopped, and took breath deeply, painfully trying to speak, choking—“Allah.”
Mahmoud Ali Daud caught the fainting man in his arms and bent close. He read more than heard the next words from Shareef Ansar’s blanching lips.
“Dead—DuPlessis—same way—ears—nailed to chest—”
And then Donachie raised his hairy fists to heaven and broke into curses, while the Arab, having lifted the unconscious man into a chair, opened his shirt, and set the electric punka into motion, walked over to the wall and studied closely the back pages of the calendar where tiny black crosses, accompanied by names, marked certain dates.
“McDonald,” he read, “Alvensleben, Moustaffa el-Touati. Three of our best—of Double-Dee’s best. And each lasted less than a week. And now—now DuPlessis—‘Afrikander’ DuPlessis—”
He turned, looked at his partner, and put his hand on his shoulder. It was a steady, strong, soothing hand, caressing the heaving shoulder with a deliberate rhythmic motion. For he could feel for the other; could read the seething, maddening rage in the other’s heart, and he remembered moments in his own life, in the past, when suddenly the madness of the tropics, following bitter disappointment, had seemed to creep out of the jungle, out of the pitiless heart of the bloated noonday sun and touch his brain with a pricking, sardonic, red-hot needle.
“Friend,” he said; “old friend—come—”
Donachie did not reply. His feet tapped the floor with rapid beats in a paroxysm of nervous restlessness. He was staring straight in front of him with unwinking, dull eyes, thinking of the past, the killing, heartbreaking work, the years of uphill fighting, the shining hopes, the promises, the great ambitions, clouted together, finally, into high achievement, into a solid burgess building cemented with blood and sweat and the enthusiasm of their youth, the steady strength of their manhood: Double-Dee, respected, envied.
And then he thought of the future—stretching before him like a gray, leprous sunset, without hopes or promises—the future of Double-Dee—a pitiful memory on the lips of the west coast traders—a leering, sneering mockery on the lips of the very riffraff, the genteel species of beachcombers, the driftwood of the outer seas who met night after
night in the bar of the Grand Hotel and cadged for drinks.
He felt a strange moisture in his eyes. His words came thick, halting, enormously sincere.
“God—help, O God!”
“God will help,” gently said the Arab. “But He will only help if we help ourselves!”
And then calmness returned to James Donachie on the backwash of his pawky Scots humor.
“You’re all to the good for a Moslem fatalist, Mahmoud my lad,” he said; and he gave a short laugh. “Double-Dee—”
“Double-Dee is wedded to Fate itself, heart of my heart!” came the Arab’s magnificent boast.
“Maybe. All I hope is that Fate will stick to her lawfully wedded husband.” And they both laughed.
CHAPTER VII.
THE CLEMENCY OF MAHMOUD ALI DAUD.
Yet the news, culminating in the baron’s mocking allusions and the London & Union Bank’s refusal to grant the loan, were bad; had been bad for months now.
It had started within two days after Mahmoud Ali Daud had refused Baron de Roubaix’s offer with his stolid counter offer of fifty-one per cent of the stock of the Chartered Company.
At first the Waranga country had been a veritable treasure house. Under the ministry of Hendrick Van Plaaten, their chief agent, the juju of Mohammed Bello’s head had worked like a charm. Trade had been smooth and tremendously profitable. Ivory, rubber, gold, and—diamonds. Diamonds had trickled down to the coast in an incessant, precious stream, so steadily that already the great DeBeers Company of Kimberly, the Diamond Trust, had begun to make diplomatic overtures to Double-Dee with a view of keeping the market from becoming glutted and the prices from tumbling.
The Warangas had seemed unspoiled and friendly, serene in their heathenish superstition that the spirit of the dead Emir Mohammed Bello had entered into Double-Dee, and that, as long as the grisly juju-head was enthroned in the jungle lodge and received certain nameless periodical sacrifices—to the fact of which Double-Dee’s agents casuistically closed their eyes—no harm would come to their kraals and their cattle.
“Nor had harm come—to them!” as James Donachie would comment ruefully.
Of course, Van Plaaten’s death had been an accident or, rather, his own fault.
A big, hairy Vaal Boer, solid, trustworthy, fearless, shrewd, he had had but one failing: whenever he came out of the wilderness and reached the comparative civilization and plenty of the coast, he had rioted and debauched for three weeks, never more nor less, on a pompous, magnificent scale.
Returning from the Waranga country one day with a very fine eighty-five carat steel-blue diamond which he had not wished to entrust to the native bearers—a diamond known afterward to the trade and to the world at large as the Double-Dee Apex, and which, after many romantic, blood-stained adventures and vicissitudes, the telling of which is another story as yet unwritten, sparkles today in the tiara of Mrs. Jackson Oberhuber, the widow of the famous Chicago packer—he had gone on his usual spree, and an overdose of dop and brandy had killed him, after his dying imagination had peopled the back room of Leopoldo de Sousa’s hotel with a splendid collection of pea-green elephants and crocodiles in a delicate shade of rose-madder.
McDonald had been sent in his stead, then Alvensleben, and then Moustaffa el-Touati. Three men of different races and temperaments: Ulster-Scot, Dane, and Arab, but all three African born and bred, familiar with the country, its customs, prejudices, and superstitions, and a diversity of its clicking languages, and all trusted employees of Double-Dee who had made good at other important bush stations before they had been sent to the Waranga country.
And, one after the other, each lasting less than a week, they had met the identical cruel, incredible, rather sardonic death. They had been found with their eyes gouged out, their tongues and ears cut off, the ears nailed to their chests with the help of spiky elephant thorns—as if, commented Mahmoud Ali Daud, the unknown assassin or assassins had meant to convey some sinister message, perhaps a warning, by the very method of killing.
It had been the fact of this method, of the three bodies having been thus mutilated, which had immediately exonerated the Warangas. For, as Sigismondo Mercado, a clever and trustworthy half-breed Portuguese bush detective who had been sent up by Double-Dee under pledge of secrecy to investigate the cases, had pointed out: the Warangas never mutilate, not even the bodies of their most hated enemies, considering such a deed blasphemy unspeakable.
Mercado had made an exhaustive examination, but had found no trace of the criminals. The natives had been fully as shocked and grieved as Double-Dee and very willing to answer all questions.
In the first case, that of Angus McDonald, his houseboys, living in a hut a stone’s throw away from the agency building, remembered having heard voices the night of the murder, McDonald’s voice, and another man’s. They had seen McDonald leave the house, still talking animatedly to someone by his side.
“Did they talk in English?” Mercado had asked.
And the answer had been that—yes—it had been English or some other European language—the Warangas did not know the difference, but were sure it had not been any of the African dialects of the neighboring countryside. Nor had they been able to recognize the stranger—it had been a dark and moonless night—not even to see if he wore the dress of a white man or of a native. They had found the mutilated body the next morning, a mile from the agency post, in the jungle undergrowth, led there by the barking of the jackals.
The news had been sent by private drum code to Double-Dee, who, knowing the jealousy of the independent traders and of the Chartered Company, and how the latter might use the murder as the thin end of the wedge wherewith to spread uneasiness among the negroes and open their campaign for commercial penetration of the Waranga country, had kept it secret and had sent Alvensleben to the interior.
Shortly afterward he had met his death when he had gone out hunting warthog, alone; and Moustaffa el-Touati, forewarned by the fate of his two predecessors, had been unable to escape it. Always, day and night, he had been protected by files of armed blacks. Yet one day, out of the thick jungle, an assegai had sobbed and pierced his heart, and two days later, in the dead of night, the grave had been opened and the corpse mutilated as the others had been.
Now, finally, it had been the turn of DuPlessis, “Afrikander” DuPlessis, the best man of his kind in Africa, just as conversant with jungle and forest lore and with savage psychology as Mahmoud Ali Daud himself. He had left with a laugh on his lips, with calm words that echoed a serene belief in his own power.
“No, no!” he had said to the two partners. “Don’t you worry on my account. I can take care of myself. If any obbligato ear-slicing has got to be done, it’s going to be little me who’s going to do the slicing.”
He had been accompanied by Shareef Ansar, the half-breed Zanzibaree, one of Double-Dee’s most loyal servants.
“I give DuPlessis effendi into thy keeping!” Mahmoud Ali Daud had said, on parting, to his former pipe-wallah. “It shall be thy honorable duty to protect him with thy life!”
The other had salaamed deeply.
“Indeed!” he had given reply. “The sword which is meant for the heart of DuPlessis effendi will have to pierce first mine own heart. I swear it on the Koran, O Sheykh!”
Everything had gone well. Another package of diamonds—two hundred odd carat in fair-sized stones—had reached the coast under DuPlessis’s seal. Word had come of a king’s ransom in first-class ivory that had been discovered. The production of rubber had taken an immediate upward leap. Peace and plenty was in the kraals. Then DuPlessis had drum-coded that he was proceeding to the coast, with Shareef Ansar, to bring important news.
And now—
Mahmoud Ali Daud bent over Shareef Ansar who was opening his eyes.
“Tell me what has happened—exactly, little brother,” he said.
And, the next moment, Shareef Ansar sat up, tried to speak, could not, and fell back at once with a choked gurgle, a thick, bl
ackish whip of blood staining his tattered burnoose.
“God—what—”
Donachie rose, as white as chalk, while the Arab tore the burnoose apart and saw, below Shareef Ansar’s first rib, a ragged wound that had slipped its clumsy, impromptu bandage of rags and palm leaves. He snapped his lean fingers rapidly to ward off the hunchbacked djinni of misfortune.
Then he straightened up.
“Donachie,” he said to his friend. “Shareef Ansar has kept his oath—partly!”
“Partly!”
“Yes. For he swore that the sword meant for DuPlessis would have to pierce first his own brave heart—and it appears that it was DuPlessis who was killed first. Shareef Ansar came here—with his last, dying strength—to bring the bitter message. And now—”
“What?” James Donachie hit the table with his clenched fist. “What’ll we do? Sell out to the Chartered Company—at their own terms—for a beggar’s pittance—shall we—shall we—”
He was silent. From the compound outside, at the river’s edge, came the incessant, uncouth babble of native voices, high-pitched, clicking, grunting, half-articulate, and every once in a while breaking into shrill, meaningless cackles and hooting laughter—the staccato, night-and-day undercurrent of all Africa’s symphony—
Donachie looked up, suddenly, sharply alert. A native voice had pronounced a name:
“DuPlessis!”
Answering clicks—uncouth grunts—excited babblings—laughter—then again:
“DuPlessis! Bad juju—”
Click-click-click—a great, sobbing grunt—more babblings—
Donachie turned to his partner.
“They also—” he began. “They seem to know—already—and—” a bitter smile curled his lips—“when the jackals howl—”
“The jackals howl indeed,” interrupted the Arab, sententiously. “But, even thus, will my old buffalo die therefore? Allah!” he went on, picking up his sjambok and making a significant gesture. “A stick to tan the jackal’s stinking hide! And, as for the old buffalo of Double-Dee—”
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 28
