The Keepers of the King's Peace - Edgar Wallace (short novels to read TXT) 📗

and took the needle from his hand. "There!"

Bones put the tiny crimson speck between his slides, blobbed a drop of oil on top, and focussed the microscope.

He looked for a long time, then turned a scared face to the girl.

"Sleepin' sickness, poor dear old Miss Hamilton!" he gasped. "You're simply full of tryps! Good Lord! What a blessin' for you I discovered it!"

Sanders pushed the young scientist aside and looked. When he turned his head, the girl saw his face was white and drawn, and for a moment a sense of panic overcame her.

"You silly ass," growled the Commissioner, "they aren't trypnosomes! You haven't cleaned the infernal eyepiece!"

"Not trypnosomes?" said Bones.

"You seem disappointed, Bones," said Hamilton.

"As a man, I'm overjoyed," replied Bones gloomily; "as a scientist, it's a set-back, dear old officer--a distinct set-back."

The house-warming lasted a much shorter time than the host had intended. This was largely due to the failure of a very beautiful experiment which he had projected. In order that the rare and wonderful result at which he aimed should be achieved, Bones had the hut artificially darkened, and they sat in a hot and sticky blackness, whilst he knocked over bottles and swore softly at the instruments his groping hand could not discover. And the end of the experiment was a large, bad smell.

"The women and children first," said Hamilton, and dived for the door.

They took farewell of Bones at a respectful distance.

Hamilton went across to the Houssa lines, and Sanders walked back to the Residency with the girl. For a little while they spoke of Bones and his newest craze, and then suddenly the girl asked--

"You didn't really think there were any of those funny things in my blood, did you?"

Sanders looked straight ahead.

"I thought--you see, we know--the tryp is a distinct little body, and anybody who had lived in this part of the world for a time can pick him out. Bones, of course, knows nothing thoroughly--I should have remembered that."

She said nothing until they reached the verandah, and she turned to go to her room.

"It wasn't nice, was it?" she said.

Sanders shook his head.

"It was a taste of hell," he said simply. And she fetched a quick, long sigh and patted his arm before she realized what she was doing.

Bones, returning from his hut, met Sanders hurrying across the square.

"Bones, I want you to go up to the Isisi," said the Commissioner. "There's an outbreak of some weird disease, probably due to the damming of the little river by Ranabini, and the flooding of the low forests."

Bones brightened up.

"Sir an' Excellency," he said gratefully, "comin' from you, this tribute to my scientific----"

"Don't be an ass, Bones!" said Sanders irritably. "Your job is to make these beggars work. They'll simply sit and die unless you start them on drainage work. Cut a few ditches with a fall to the river; kick Ranabini for me; take up a few kilos of quinine and dose them."

Nevertheless, Bones managed to smuggle on board quite a respectable amount of scientific apparatus, and came in good heart to the despondent folk of the Lower Isisi.

Three weeks after Bones had taken his departure, Sanders was sitting at dinner in a very thoughtful mood.

Patricia had made several ineffectual attempts to draw him into a conversation, and had been answered in monosyllables. At first she had been piqued and a little angry, but, as the meal progressed, she realized that matters of more than ordinary seriousness were occupying his thoughts, and wisely changed her attitude of mind. A chance reference to Bones, however, succeeded where more pointed attempts had failed.

"Yes," said Sanders, in answer to the question she had put, "Bones has some rough idea of medical practice. He was a cub student at Bart.'s for two years before he realized that surgery and medicines weren't his forte."

"Don't you sometimes feel the need of a doctor here?" she asked, and Sanders smiled.

"There is very little necessity. The military doctor comes down occasionally from headquarters, and we have a native apothecary. We have few epidemics amongst the natives, and those the medical missions deal with--sleep-sickness, beri-beri and the like. Sometimes, of course, we have a pretty bad outbreak which spreads----Don't go, Hamilton--I want to see you for a minute."

Hamilton had risen, and was making for his room, with a little nod to his sister.

At Sanders's word he turned.

"Walk with me for a few minutes," said Sanders, and, with an apology to the girl, he followed the other from the room.

"What is it?" asked Hamilton.

Sanders was perturbed--this he knew, and his own move towards his room was in the nature of a challenge for information.

"Bones," said the Commissioner shortly. "Do you realize that we have had no news from him since he left?"

Hamilton smiled.

"He's an erratic beggar, but nothing could have happened to him, or we should have heard about it."

Sanders did not reply at once. He paced up and down the gravelled path before the Residency, his hands behind him.

"No news has come from Ranabini's village for the simple reason that nobody has entered or left it since Bones arrived," he said. "It is situated, as you know, on a tongue of land at the confluence of two rivers. No boat has left the beaches, and an attempt to reach it by land has been prevented by force."

"By force?" repeated the startled Hamilton.

Sanders nodded.

"I had the report in this morning. Two men of the Isisi from another village went to call on some relations. They were greeted with arrows, and returned hurriedly. The headman of M'gomo village met with the same reception. This came to the ears of my chief spy Ahmet, who attempted to paddle to the island in his canoe. At a distance of two hundred yards he was fired upon."

"Then they've got Bones?" gasped Hamilton.

"On the contrary, Bones nearly got Ahmet, for Bones was the marksman."

The two men paced the path in silence.

"Either Bones has gone mad," said Hamilton, "or----"

"Or----?"

Hamilton laughed helplessly.

"I can't fathom the mystery," he said. "McMasters will be down to-morrow, to look at some sick men. We'll take him up, and examine the boy."

It was a subdued little party that boarded the _Zaire_ the following morning, and Patricia Hamilton, who came to see them off, watched their departure with a sense of impending trouble.

Dr. McMasters alone was cheerful, for this excursion represented a break in a somewhat monotonous routine.

"It may be the sun," he suggested. "I have known several fellows who have gone a little nutty from that cause. I remember a man at Grand Bassam who shot----"

"Oh, shut up, Mac, you grisly devil!" snapped Hamilton. "Talk about butterflies."

The _Zaire_ swung round the bend of the river that hid Ranabini's village from view, but had scarcely come into sight when--

"Ping!"

Sanders saw the bullet strike the river ahead of the boat, and send a spiral column of water shooting into the air. He put up his glasses and focussed them on the village beach.

"Bones!" he said grimly. "Take her in, Abiboo."

As the steersman spun the wheel--

"Ping!"

This time the shot fell to the right.

The three white men looked at one another.

"Let every man take cover," said Sanders quietly. "We're going to that beach even if Bones has a battery of 75's!"

An exclamation from Hamilton arrested him.

"He's signalling," said the Houssa Captain, and Sanders put up his glasses again.

Bones's long arms were waving at ungainly angles as he semaphored his warning.

Hamilton opened his notebook and jotted down the message--

"Awfully sorry, dear old officer," he spelt, and grinned at the unnecessary exertion of this fine preliminary flourish, "but must keep you away. Bad outbreak of virulent smallpox----"

Sanders whistled, and pulled back the handle of the engine-room telegraph to "stop."

"My God!" said Hamilton through his teeth, for he had seen such an outbreak once, and knew something of its horrors. Whole districts had been devastated in a night. One tribe had been wiped out, and the rotting frames of their houses still showed amidst the tangle of elephant grass which had grown up through the ruins.

He wiped his forehead and read the message a little unsteadily, for his mind was on his sister--

"Had devil of fight, and lost twenty men, but got it under. Come
and get me in three weeks. Had to stay here for fear careless
devils spreading disease."

Sanders looked at Hamilton, and McMasters chuckled.

"This is where I get a swift vacation," he said, and called his servant.

Hamilton leapt on to the rail, and steadying himself against a stanchion, waved a reply--

"We are sending you a doctor."

Back came the reply in agitated sweeps of arm--

"Doctor be blowed! What am I?"

"What shall I say, sir?" asked Hamilton after he had delivered the message.

"Just say 'a hero,'" said Sanders huskily.


CHAPTER VII

BONES, KING-MAKER


Patricia Hamilton, an observant young lady, had not failed to notice that every day, at a certain hour, Bones disappeared from view. It was not for a long time that she sought an explanation.

"Where is Bones?" she asked one morning, when the absence of her cavalier was unusually protracted.

"With his baby," said her brother.

"Please don't be comic, dear. Where is Bones? I thought I saw him with the ship's doctor."

The mail had come in that morning, and the captain and surgeon of the s.s. _Boma Queen_ had been their guests at breakfast.

Hamilton looked up from his book and removed his pipe.

"Do you mean to tell me that Bones has kept his guilty secret all this time?" he asked anxiously.

She sat down by his side.

"Please tell me the joke. This isn't the first time you have ragged Bones about 'the baby'; even Mr. Sanders has done it."

She looked across at the Commissioner with a reproving shake of her pretty head.

"Have _I_ ragged Bones?" asked Sanders, in surprise. "I never thought I was capable of ragging anybody."

"The truth is, Pat," said her brother, "there isn't any rag about the matter. Bones adopted a piccanin."

"A child?"

"A baby about a month old. Its mother died, and some old bird of a witch-doctor was 'chopping' it when Bones appeared on the scene."

Patricia gave a little gurgle of delight and clapped her hands. "Oh, please tell me everything about it."

"It was Sanders who told her of Henry Hamilton Bones, his dire peril and his rescue; it was Hamilton who embellished the story of how Bones had given his adopted son his first bath.

"Just dropped him into a tub and stirred him round with a mop."

Soon after this Bones came blithely up from the beach and across the parade-ground, his large pipe in his mouth, his cane awhirl.

Hamilton watched him from the verandah of the Residency, and called over his shoulder to Patricia.

It had been an anxious morning for Bones, and even Hamilton was compelled to