Bones of the River by Edgar Wallace Page A

once I had kept many birds. Did my leopard sing or fly or make ‘chip-chip’ noises?”
    “Boy, you are foolish,” said his unimaginative father, “for you have caught no leopard and you have no fine house where birds are kept.”
    “That is my mystery,” said N’shimba, and, rising, walked away to the forest and was not seen for three days. When he returned, he brought with him a young girl of the Inner lsisi.
    “This is my wife,” he said.
    The father said nothing, for the boy was sixteen and of a marrying age. The new wife, on the contrary, said much.
    “I do not want this man, your son,” she said frankly. “I am a great dancer, and my price is ten bundles of ten malakos in ten heaps ten times ten repeated. A man of my people would give as much salt as would fill a hut if I would be his wife, yet your son comes to me and takes me and gives nothing to my father nor to me. And when I turned from him, he struck me down. Here is the mark.”
    The mark was horridly patent, and N’shimba’s father was troubled and sought his son.
    “Why have you taken this woman?” he asked. “Presently her father will come and demand her price. And Sandi will come and give judgment against me. Let her go, for, even if you are married to her, what does it matter? Is there not a saying that ‘Women marry many times but have one husband’?”
    “I am that man,” said N’shimba. “As to Sandi, I am the child of his spirit, as all people know, and I take what I need.”
    That evening he beat his new wife, and her father, arriving in wrath to make the best of a bad bargain, was also beaten to his shame.
    “Who is N’shimba?” asked Captain Hamilton curiously when the news came to headquarters, and Sanders, a thoughtful, troubled man, explained.
    “It wouldn’t worry me at all, but the young devil has used the slogan of the old N’shimba, ‘I take what I need’ – and that is a very bad sign. One whisper of black eggs and I will take N’shimba and hang him.”
    He sent a warning, and marked down N’shimba in his diary as one to be interviewed when he next went north. Then one day there came into existence the Blood Friends of Young Hearts.
    In native territories, secret societies are born in a night, and with them their inspired ritual. From what brain they come, none knows. The manner of their dissolution is as mysterious. They come and they go; perform strange rites, initiate secret dances; men meet one another and say meaningless but thrilling words; there is a ferment and thrill in life – then of a sudden they are no more. Sometimes there is a little blood-letting, as when the N’gombi people held a society which was called The Mystery of the Five Straight Marks. Five cuts on the left cheek was the sign of the order. Sanders heard, saw, said nothing. On the whole, he thought the personal appearance of the N’gombi people was improved by the mutilations. But when, at a big palaver of the society, an Ochori girl was beheaded and her skin distributed to the members of the order, Sanders went quickly to the spot, hanged the leaders, flogged their headmen, and burnt the village that had been the scene of the ceremony. Thereafter the Five Marks vanished from existence.
    “Ahmet says N’shimba is behind this new society,” he said, calling Hamilton into his airy little office. “I’m scared lest N’shimba discovers that the mantle of his disreputable namesake has descended upon him. If he does, there will be bad trouble. I think I’ll send Bones to the Isisi with a platoon of young men. The wholesome presence of authority may nip in the bud the activities of the Young Hearts.”
    “Why ‘Young Hearts’?” asked Hamilton lazily.
    “They are mostly young men, and the movement is spreading,” said Sanders. “Bosambo has reported that a branch of this interesting society has been formed in the heart of the Ochori city.”
    “Send Bones,” suggested Hamilton promptly. “I know of no more depressing