The Great Impersonation

Great Impersonation, by E.
Phillips Oppenheim

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Title: The Great Impersonation
Author: E. Phillips Oppenheim

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THE GREAT IMPERSONATION By E. Phillips Oppenheim
First published 1920.

THE GREAT IMPERSONATION
BY
E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM

THE GREAT IMPERSONATION
CHAPTER I
The trouble from which great events were to come began when Everard
Dominey, who had been fighting his way through the scrub for the last
three quarters of an hour towards those thin, spiral wisps of smoke,

urged his pony to a last despairing effort and came crashing through the
great oleander shrub to pitch forward on his head in the little clearing.
It developed the next morning, when he found himself for the first time
for many months on the truckle bed, between linen sheets, with a cool,
bamboo-twisted roof between him and the relentless sun. He raised
himself a little in the bed.
"Where the mischief am I?" he demanded.
A black boy, seated cross-legged in the entrance of the banda, rose to
his feet, mumbled something and disappeared. In a few moments the
tall, slim figure of a European, in spotless white riding clothes, stooped
down and came over to Dominey's side.
"You are better?" he enquired politely.
"Yes, I am," was the somewhat brusque rejoinder. "Where the mischief
am I, and who are you?"
The newcomer's manner stiffened. He was a person of dignified
carriage, and his tone conveyed some measure of rebuke.
"You are within half a mile of the Iriwarri River, if you know where
that is," he replied,--"about seventy-two miles southeast of the
Darawaga Settlement."
"The devil! Then I am in German East Africa?"
"Without a doubt."
"And you are German?"
"I have that honour."
Dominey whistled softly.
"Awfully sorry to have intruded," he said. "I left Marlinstein two and a
half months ago, with twenty boys and plenty of stores. We were doing
a big trek after lions. I took some new Askaris in and they made

trouble,--looted the stores one night and there was the devil to pay. I
was obliged to shoot one or two, and the rest deserted. They took my
compass, damn them, and I'm nearly a hundred miles out of my
bearings. You couldn't give me a drink, could you?"
"With pleasure, if the doctor approves," was the courteous answer.
"Here, Jan!"
The boy sprang up, listened to a word or two of brief command in his
own language, and disappeared through the hanging grass which led
into another hut. The two men exchanged glances of rather more than
ordinary interest. Then Dominey laughed.
"I know what you're thinking," he said. "It gave me quite a start when
you came in. We're devilishly alike, aren't we?"
"There is a very strong likeness between us," the other admitted.
Dominey leaned his head upon his hand and studied his host. The
likeness was clear enough, although the advantage was all in favour of
the man who stood by the side of the camp bedstead with folded arms.
Everard Dominey, for the first twenty-six years of his life, had lived as
an ordinary young Englishman of his position,--Eton, Oxford, a few
years in the Army, a few years about town, during which he had
succeeded in making a still more hopeless muddle of his already
encumbered estates: a few months of tragedy, and then a blank.
Afterwards ten years--at first in the cities, then in the dark places of
Africa--years of which no man knew anything. The Everard Dominey
of ten years ago had been, without a doubt, good-looking.