Tales of Adventurers by Geoffrey Household

reasonable excuse. Smith put his bravado into his
driving. It was brutal. He didn’t seem to care whether they ever reached London or not.
    “God, he put the wind up me!” Medlock said to Virian, obsessed by his companion of ten years before, “And that blood on his boots—”
    Smith hadn’t noticed the blood. He had only heard it when he lifted Dupont’s shoulders. They made him get out and wash it off in a stream.
    “God, he was a tough, and no mistake!” Medlock persisted. “I don’t mind telling you – he used to chase me around in my dreams.”
    “He said the same of you,” Virian answered.
    “Eh? What do you mean? What do you mean? I thought you didn’t know him.”
    “No, I didn’t know him. But I saw a letter of his.”
    “He wrote about me?” Medlock barked indignantly.
    “About you … and me … and especially Fayze. Smith was just one of his civilian clerks. Temporarily unfit for general service, worshiping his boss and longing to work for him on a
real secret mission. Fayze wasn’t the man to lose a chance like that; so he used him, and put him into uniform for the job. He told Smith that it was a trial trip, that if he had the nerve to
assist us in every way
…”
    Medlock put down his drink and retched.
    “That bastard Fayze!” he shouted.
    “Yes. But, if it’s any comfort to you, in
his
dreams there are two of them to chase him around. Smith killed himself a week later. It was his letter to his parents that I
saw. Fayze got it before the police. I need hardly tell you that it went no further.”

 
     
     
     
Debt of Honor
     
     
     
     
    I T WAS NOT in the nature of the Bagai to weep. Their training, like that of the district commissioner now standing by the
loaded lorry which was to take him from them to the coast, forbade the expression of emotion in public. Dark eyes stared over the deep-breathing line of the giraffe-hide shields. The district
commissioner stared back without a word. To a stranger it would have seemed that the Bagai were parting with their most hated enemy, for he would have known nothing of the long councils, the
swearings of blood brotherhood, the agony of old men who had come alone and in the night to the beloved tent, terrified for their people’s future in a changing and hostile world, as children
whose father should be compelled, without hope of return, to leave them.
    Overhead the clouds wallowed lazily up from the Indian Ocean, rolling westward through the gray morning like a herd of leisurely Bagai cattle towards the Bagai hills. The faint, deep lowing of
thunder echoed from the edge of the escarpment where the spears of sun, radiant as in the steel engraving of some family Bible, pierced through a screen of straight-falling rain. To north and south
the clouds were spreading into the heart of Africa without shedding any of their burden upon farms of white men and parched clearings of black. It was the copper-colored Bagai who had all the
luck.
    The warriors, their backs towards their country and the long-needed rain, paid no heed to this good fortune. At such a crisis in the little nation’s life, pasture and crops were
irrelevant. Grief – collective, overwhelming grief – obsessed them. Yet their only gesture of farewell was the silent stare, answered and for the same Spartan reasons by the lonely man
standing at the side of his lorry. They had no royal salute with which to send Mark Lee-Armour on his way, for they had no kings. No slaying of men or cattle could appease their sorrow, for they
had no tradition of sacrifice.
    The two officials, one of State and one of Church, who accompanied Lee-Armour effaced themselves from the scene so far as dignity permitted, standing apart from the austere leave-taking with the
delicacy of those who are present at a friend’s parting from his beloved wife. One was the new district commissioner of the Bagai; the other was the Archdeacon of the Sultanates who had been
on tour through the diocese