The People of the River | Page 7

changed their positions slightly.
"If your game is a fair game," he said, "show me the cup with the ball."
"Lord, it is the centre one," said Bosambo without hesitation.
Sanders raised the cup.
There was no ball.
"I see," said Bosambo slowly, "I see that my lord Sandi is also a Christian."
"It was a jest," explained Bosambo to his headmen when Sanders had departed; "thus my lord Sandi always jested even when I nursed him as a child. Menchimis, let the lokali sound and the people be brought together for a greater palaver and I will tell them the story of Sandi, who is my half-brother by another mother."
2. THE ELOQUENT WOMAN
THERE was a woman of the N'Gombi people who had a suave tongue. When she spoke men listened eagerly, for she was of the kind peculiar to no race, being born with stirring words.
She stirred the people of her own village to such effect that they went one night and raided French territory, bringing great shame to her father; for Sanders came hurriedly north, and there were some summary whippings, and nearly a burying. Thereupon her father thought it wise to marry this woman to a man who could check her tongue.
So he married her to a chief, who was of the N'Gombi folk, and this chief liked her so much that he made her his principal wife, building a hut for her next to his. About her neck he had fixed a ring of brass, weighing some twenty-four pounds--a great distinction which his other wives envied.
This principal wife was nearly fifteen years old--which is approaching middle age on the River--and was, in consequence, very wise in the ways of men. Too wise, some thought, and certainly her lord had cause for complaint when, returning from a hunting expedition a day or two before he could possibly return, he found his wife more happy than was to his liking and none too lonely.
"M'fashimbi," he said, as she knelt before him with her arms folded meekly on her bare, brown bosom, "in the days of my father I should bend down a stripling tree and rope your neck to it, and when your head was struck from your body I should burn you and he that made me ashamed. But that is not the law of the white man, and I think you are too worthless a woman for me to risk my neck upon."
"Lord, I am of little good," she said.
For a whole day she lay on the ground surrounded by the whole of the village, to whom she talked whilst the workmen sawed away at the brass collar. At the end of that time the collar was removed from her neck, and the chief sent her back to the parent from whom he had most expensively bought her. He sent her back in the face of great opposition, for she had utilised her time profitably and the village was so moved by her eloquence that it was ripe for rebellion.
For no woman is put away from her man, whether she wears the feathers and silks of Paris or the camwood and oil of the N'Gombi, without harbouring for that man a most vengeful and hateful feeling, and no sooner had M'fashimbi paddled clear of her husband's village than she set herself the task of avenging herself upon him.
There accompanied her into exile the man with whom, and for whom, she had risked and lost so much. He was named Otapo, and he was a dull one.
As they paddled, she, kneeling in the canoe behind him, said: "Otapo, my husband has done me a great wrong and put dust on my head, yet you say nothing."
"Why should I speak when you have spoken so much?" asked Otapo calmly. "I curse the day I ever saw you, M'fashimbi, for my error has cost me a fishing-net, which was the best in the village, also a new piece of cloth I bought from a trader; these our lord chief has taken."
"If you had the heart of a man you would have killed Namani, my husband," she said.
"I have killed myself and lost my net," said Otapo; "also my piece of cloth."
"You are like a woman," she jeered.
"I could wish that my mother had borne a girl when she bore me," said Otapo, "then I should not have been disgraced."
She paddled in silence for a while, and then she said of a sudden:
"Let us go to the bank, for I have hidden some treasures of my husband near this spot."
Otapo turned the head of the canoe to the shore with one long stroke.
As they neared the bank she reached behind her and found a short spear, such as you use for hunting animals where the grass is thick.
She held it in both hands, laying the point