To Isongo, which stands upon the tributary
of that name, came a woman of the Isisi who had lost
her husband through a providential tree falling upon
him. I say “providential,” for it
was notorious that he was an evil man, a drinker of
beer and a favourite of many bad persons. Also
he made magic in the forest, and was reputedly the
familiar of Bashunbi the devil brother of M’shimba-M’shamba.
He beat his wives, and once had set fire to his house
from sheer wickedness. So that when he was borne
back to the village on a grass bier and the women
of his house decked themselves with green leaves and
arm in arm staggered and stamped through the village
street in their death dance, there was a suspicion
of hilarity in their song, and a more cheery step in
their dance than the occasion called for.
An old man named D’wiri, who
knew every step of every dance, saw this and said
in his stern way that it was shameless. But he
was old and was, moreover, in fear for the decorum
of his own obsequies if these outrageous departures
from custom were approved or allowed to pass without
reprimand.
When M’lama, the wife of G’mami,
had seen her lord depart in the canoe for burial in
the middle island and had wailed her conventional grief,
she washed the dust from her body at the river’s
edge and went back to her hut. And all that was
grief for the dead man was washed away with the dust
of mourning.
Many moons came out of the sky, were
wasted and died before the woman M’lama showed
signs of her gifts. It is said that they appeared
one night after a great storm wherein lightning played
such strange tricks upon the river that even the old
man D’wiri could not remember parallel instances.
In the night the wife of a hunter
named E’sani-Osoni brought a dying child into
the hut of the widow. He had been choked by a
fish-bone and was in extremis when M’lama
put her hand upon his head and straightway the bone
flew from his mouth, “and there was a cry terrible
to hear such a cry as a leopard makes when
he is pursued by ghosts.”
A week later a baby girl fell into
a terrible fit and M’lama had laid her hand
upon it and behold! it slept from that moment.
Ahmet, chief of the Government spies,
heard of these happenings and came a three days’
journey by river to Isongo.
“What are these stories of miracles?”
he asked.
“Capita,” said
the chief, using the term of regard which is employed
in the Belgian Congo, “this woman M’lama
is a true witch and has great gifts, for she raises
the dead by the touch of her hand. This I have
seen. Also it is said that when U’gomi,
the woodcutter, made a fault, cutting his foot in
two, this woman healed him marvellously.”
“I will see this M’lama,” said Ahmet
importantly.
He found her in her hut tossing four
bones idly. These were the shanks of goats, and
each time they fell differently.
“O Ahmet,” she said, when
he entered, “you have a wife who is sick, also
a first-born boy who does not speak though he is more
than six seasons old.”
Ahmet squatted down by her side.
“Woman,” said he, “tell
me something that is not the talk of river and I will
believe your magic.”
“To-morrow your master, the
lord Sandi, will send you a book which will give you
happiness,” she said.
“Every day my lord sends me
a book,” retorted the sceptical Ahmet, “and
each brings me happiness. Also it is common talk
that at this time there come messengers carrying bags
of silver and salt to pay men according to their services.”
Undismayed she tried her last shot.
“You have a crooked finger which none can straighten behold!”
She took his hand in hers and pressed
the injured phlange. A sharp pain shot up his
arm and he winced, pulling back his hand but
the year-old dislocation which had defied the effort
of the coast doctor was straightened out, and though
the movement was exquisitely painful he could bend
it.
“I see you are a true witch,”
he said, greatly impressed, for a native has a horror
of deformity of any kind, and he sent back word of
the phenomenon to Sanders.
Sanders at the same time was in receipt
of other news which alternately pleased him and filled
him with panic. The mail had come in by fast
launch and had brought Captain Hamilton of the Houssas
a very bulky letter written in a feminine hand.
He had broken the glad news to Commissioner Sanders,
but that gentleman was not certain in his mind whether
the startling intelligence conveyed by the letter was
good or bad.
“I’m sure the country
will suit her,” he said, “this part of
the country at any rate but what will Bones
say?”
“Bones!” repeated Captain
Hamilton scornfully. “What the dickens does
it matter what Bones says?”
Nevertheless, he went to the sea-end
of the verandah, and his roar rivalled the thunder
of the surf.
“Bones!”
There was no answer and for an excellent reason.
Sanders came out of the bungalow,
his helmet on the back of his head, a cheroot tilted
dizzily.
“Where is he?” he asked.
Hamilton turned.
“I asked him to at
least I didn’t ask him, he volunteered to
peg out a trench line.”
“Expect an invasion?” asked Sanders.
Hamilton grinned.
“Bones does,” he said.
“He’s full of the idea, and offered to
give me tips on the way a trench should be dug he’s
feeling rotten about things ... you know what I mean.
His regiment was at Mons.”
Sanders nodded.
“I understand,” he said
quietly. “And you ... you’re a jolly
good soldier, Hamilton how do you feel
about it all?”
Hamilton shrugged his shoulders.
“They would have taken me for
the Cameroons, but somebody had to stay,” he
said quietly. “After all, it is one’s
business to ... to do one’s job in the station
of life to which it has pleased God to call him.
This is my work ... here.”
Sanders laid his hand on the other’s shoulder.
“That’s the game as it
should be played,” he said, and his blue eyes
were as soft and as tender as a woman’s.
“There is no war here we are the
keepers of the King’s peace, Hamilton.”
“It’s rotten....”
“I know I feel that
way myself. We’re out of it the
glory of it the chance of it the
tragedy of it. And there are others. Think
of the men in India eating their hearts out ... praying
for the order that will carry them from the comfort
of their lives to the misery and the death and
the splendour, I grant you of war.”
He sighed and looked wistfully to the blue sea.
Hamilton beckoned a Houssa corporal
who was crossing the garden of the Residency.
“Ho, Mustaf,” he said,
in his queer coast Arabic, “where shall I look
for my lord Tibbetti?”
The corporal turned and pointed to
the woods which begin at the back of the Residency
and carry without a break for three hundred miles.
“Lord, he went there carrying
many strange things also there went with
him Ali Abid, his servant.”
Hamilton reached through an open window
of the bungalow and fished out his helmet with his
walking-stick.
“We’ll find Bones,”
he said grimly; “he’s been gone three hours
and he’s had time to re-plan Verdun.”
It took some time to discover the
working party, but when it was found the trouble was
well repaid.
Bones was stretched on a canvas chair
under the shade of a big Isisi palm. His helmet
was tipped forward so that the brim rested on the
bridge of his nose, his thin red arms were folded on
his breast, and their gentle rise and fall testified
to his shame. Two pegs had been driven in, and
between them a string sagged half-heartedly.
Curled up under a near-by bush was,
presumably, Ali Abid presumably, because
all that was visible was a very broad stretch of brown
satin skin which showed between the waistline of a
pair of white cotton trousers and a duck jacket.
They looked down at the unconscious
Bones for a long time in silence.
“What will he say when I kick
him?” asked Hamilton. “You can have
the first guess.”
Sanders frowned thoughtfully.
“He’ll say that he was
thinking out a new system of communicating trenches,”
he said. “He’s been boring me to tears
over saps and things.”
Hamilton shook his head.
“Wrong, sir,” he said;
“that isn’t the lie he’ll tell.
He will say that I kept him up so late last night
working at the men’s pay-sheets that he couldn’t
keep awake.”
Bones slept on.
“He may say that it was coffee
after tiffin,” suggested Sanders after a while;
“he said the other day that coffee always made
him sleep.”
“‘Swoon’ was the
word he used, sir,” corrected Hamilton.
“I don’t think he’ll offer that
suggestion now the only other excuse I can
think of is that he was repeating the Bomongo irregular
verbs. Bones!”
He stooped and broke off a long grass
and inserted it in the right ear of Lieutenant Tibbetts,
twiddling the end delicately. Bones made a feeble
clutch at his ear, but did not open his eyes.
“Bones!” said Hamilton,
and kicked him less gently. “Get up, you
lazy devil there’s an invasion.”
Bones leapt to his feet and staggered
a little; blinked fiercely at his superior and saluted.
“Enemy on the left flank, sir,”
he reported stiffly. “Shall we have dinner
or take a taxi?”
“Wake up, Napoleon,” begged
Hamilton, “you’re at Waterloo.”
Bones blinked more slowly.
“I’m afraid I’ve
been unconscious, dear old officer,” he confessed.
“The fact is ”
“Listen to this, everybody,” said Hamilton
admiringly.
“The fact is, sir,” said
Bones, with dignity, “I fell asleep that
beastly coffee I had after lunch, added to the fatigue
of sittin’ up half the night with those jolly
old accounts of yours, got the better of me.
I was sittin’ down workin’ out one of the
dinkiest little ideas in trenches a sort
of communicatin’ trench where you needn’t
get wet in the rainiest weather when I well,
I just swooned off.”
Hamilton looked disappointed.
“Weren’t you doing anything with the Bomongo
verbs?” he demanded.
A light came to Bones’s eyes.
“By Jove, sir!” he said
heartily, “that was it, of course.... The
last thing I remember was....”
“Kick that man of yours and
come back to the bungalow,” Hamilton interrupted,
“there’s a job for you, my boy.”
He walked across and stirred the second
sleeper with the toe of his boot.
Ali Abid wriggled round and sat up.
He was square of face, with a large
mouth and two very big brown eyes. He was enormously
fat, but it was not fat of the flabby type. Though
he called himself Ali, it was, as Bones admitted,
“sheer swank” to do so, for this man had
“coast” written all over him.
He got up slowly and saluted first
his master, then Sanders, and lastly Hamilton.
Bones had found him at Cape Coast
Castle on the occasion of a joy-ride which the young
officer had taken on a British man-of-war. Ali
Abid had been the heaven-sent servant, and though
Sanders had a horror of natives who spoke English,
the English of Ali Abid was his very own.
He had been for five years the servant
of Professor Garrileigh, the eminent bacteriologist,
the account of whose researches in the field of tropical
medicines fill eight volumes of closely-printed matter,
every page of which contains words which are not to
be found in most lexicons.
They walked back to the Residency, Ali Abid in the
rear.
“I want you to go up to the
Isongo, Bones,” said Sanders; “there may
be some trouble there a woman is working
miracles.”
“He might get a new head,”
murmured Hamilton, but Bones pretended not to hear.
“Use your tact and get back
before the 17th for the party.”
“The ?” asked Bones.
He had an irritating trick of employing
extravagant gestures of a fairly commonplace kind.
Thus, if he desired to hear a statement repeated though
he had heard it well enough the first time he
would bend his head with a puzzled wrinkle of forehead,
put his hand to his ear and wait anxiously, even painfully,
for the repetition.
“You heard what the Commissioner
said,” growled Hamilton. “Party P-A-R-T-Y.”
“My birthday is not until April,
your Excellency,” said Bones.
“I’d guess the date but
what’s the use?” interposed Hamilton.
“It isn’t a birthday party,
Bones,” said Sanders. “We are giving
a house-warming for Miss Hamilton.”
Bones gasped, and turned an incredulous
eye upon his chief.
“You haven’t a sister,
surely, dear old officer?” he asked.
“Why the dickens shouldn’t
I have a sister?” demanded his chief.
Bones shrugged his shoulders.
“A matter of deduction, sir,”
he said quietly. “Absence of all evidence
of a soothin’ and lovin’ influence in your
lonely an’ unsympathetic upbringin’; hardness
of heart an’ a disposition to nag, combined with
a rough and unpromisin’ exterior a
sister, good Lord!”
“Anyway, she’s coming,
Bones,” said Hamilton; “and she’s
looking forward to seeing you I’ve
written an awful lot about you.”
Bones smirked.
“Of course,” he said,
“you’ve overdone it a bit women
hate to be disillusioned. What you ought to have
done, sir, is to describe me as a sort of ass genial
and all that sort of thing, but a commonplace sort
of ass.”
Hamilton nodded.
“That’s exactly what I’ve
done, Bones,” he said. “I told her
how Bosambo did you in the eye for twenty pounds,
and how you fell into the water looking for buried
treasure, and how the Isisi tried to sell you a flying
crocodile and would have sold it too, if it hadn’t
been for my timely arrival. I told her ”
“I think you’ve said enough, sir.”
Bones was very red and very haughty.
“Far be it from me to resent
your attitude or contradict your calumnies. Miss
Hamilton will see very little of me. An inflexible
sense of duty will keep me away from the frivolous
circle of society, sir. Alert an’ sleepless ”
“Trenches,” said Hamilton brutally.
Bones winced, regarded his superior
for a moment with pain, saluted, and turning on his
heel, stalked away, followed by Ali Abid no less pained.
He left at dawn the next morning,
and both Sanders and Hamilton came down to the concrete
quay to see the Zaïre start on her journey.
Sanders gave his final instructions
“If the woman is upsetting the
people, arrest her; if she has too big a hold on them,
arrest her; but if she is just amusing them, come back.”
“And don’t forget the 17th,” said
Hamilton.
“I may arrive a little late
for that,” said Bones gravely. “I
don’t wish to be a skeleton at your jolly old
festive board, dear old sportsman you will
excuse my absence to Miss Hamilton. I shall probably
have a headache and all that sort of thing.”
He waved a sad farewell as the Zaïre
passed round the bend of the river, and looked, as
he desired to look, a melancholy figure with his huge
pipe in his mouth and his hands thrust dejectedly into
his trousers pockets.
Once out of sight he became his own jovial self.
“Lieutenant Ali,” he said,
“get out my log and put it in old Sanders’
cabin, make me a cup of tea and keep her jolly old
head east, east by north.”
“Ay, ay, sir,” said Ali in excellent English.
The “log” which Bones
kept was one of the secret documents which never come
under the eye of the superior authorities. There
were such entries as
“Wind N.N.W. Sea calm.
Hostile craft sighted on port bow, at 10.31 a.m.
General Quarters sounded 10.32. Interrogated Captain
of the hostile craft and warned him not to fish
in fair-way. Sighted Cape M’Gooboori
12.17, stopped for lunch and wood.”
What though Cape M’Gooboori
was the village of that name and the “calm sea”
was no more than the placid bosom of the Great River?
What though Bones’s “hostile craft”
was a dilapidated canoe, manned by one aged and bewildered
man of the Isisi engaged in spearing fish? Bones
saw all things through the rosy spectacles of adventurous
youth denied its proper share of experience.
At sunset the Zaïre came gingerly
through the shoals that run out from the Isongo beach,
and Bones went ashore to conduct his investigations.
It chanced that the evening had been chosen by M’lama,
the witch, for certain wonderful manifestations, and
the village was almost deserted.
In a wood and in a place of green
trees M’lama sat tossing her sheep shanks, and
a dense throng of solemn men and women squatted or
sat or tiptoed about her leaving her a
respectable space for her operations. A bright
fire crackled and glowed at her side, and into this,
from time to time, she thrust little sticks of plaited
straw and drew them forth blazing and spluttering
until with a quick breath she extinguished the flame
and examined the grey ash.
“Listen, all people,”
she said, “and be silent, lest my great ju-ju
strike you dead. What man gave me this?”
“It was I, M’lama,”
said an eager woman, her face wrinkled with apprehension
as she held up her brown palm.
The witch peered forward at the speaker.
“O F’sela!” she
chanted, “there is a man-child for thee who shall
be greater than chiefs; also you will suffer from
a sickness which shall make you mad.”
“O ko!”
Half dismayed by the promise of her
own fate; half exalted by the career the witch had
sketched for her unborn son, the woman stared incredulously,
fearfully at the swaying figure by the fire.
Again a plaited stick went into the
fire, was withdrawn and blown out, and the woman again
prophesied.
And sometimes it was of honours and
riches she spoke, and sometimes and more
often of death and disaster. Into this
shuddering group strode Bones, very finely clad in
white raiment yet limp withal, for the night was close
and the way had been long and rough.
The sitters scrambled to their feet,
their knuckles at their teeth, for this was a moment
of great embarrassment.
“Oh, M’lama,” said
Bones agreeably, and spoke in the soft dialect of the
Isisi by-the-River, “prophesy for me!”
She looked up sullenly, divining trouble for herself.
“Lord,” she said, with
a certain smooth venom, “there is a great sickness
for you and behold you will go far away
and die, and none shall miss you.”
Bones went very red, and shook an
indignant forefinger at the offending prophetess.
“You’re a wicked old storyteller!”
he stammered. “You’re depressin’
the people you naughty girl! I hate
you I simply loathe you!”
As he spoke in English she was not impressed.
“Goin’ about the country
puttin’ people off their grub, by Jove!”
he stormed; “tellin’ stories ... oh, dash
it, I shall have to be awfully severe with you!”
Severe he was, for he arrested her,
to the relief of her audience, who waited long enough
to discover whether or not her ju-ju would strike him
dead, and being obviously disappointed by her failure
to provide this spectacle, melted away.
Close to the gangway of the Zaïre
she persuaded one of her Houssa guard to release his
hold. She persuaded him by the simple expedient
of burying her sharp white teeth in the fleshy part
of his arm and bolted. They captured
her half mad with panic and fear of her unknown fate,
and brought her to the boat.
Bones, fussing about the struggling
group, dancing with excitement, was honourably wounded
by the chance contact of his nose with a wild and
whirling fist.
“Put her in the store cabin!”
he commanded breathlessly. “Oh, what a
wicked woman!”
In the morning as the boat got under
way Ali came to him with a distressing story.
“Your Excellency will be pained
to hear,” he said, “that the female prisoner
has eradicated her costume.”
“Eradicated...?” repeated
the puzzled Bones, gently touching the patch of sticking-plaster
on his nose.
“In the night,” explained
this former slave of science, “the subject has
developed symptoms of mania, and has entirely dispensed
with her clothes to wit, by destruction.”
“She’s torn up her clothes?”
gasped Bones, his hair rising and Ali nodded.
Now, the dress of a native woman varies
according to the degree in which she falls under missionary
influence. Isongo was well within the sphere
of the River Mission, and so M’lama’s costume
consisted of a tight-fitting piece of print which
wound round and round the body in the manner of a
kilt, covering the figure from armpit to feet.
Bones went to the open window of the
prison cabin, and steadfastly averting his gaze, called
“M’lama!”
No reply came, and he called again.
“M’lama,” he said
gently, in the river dialect, “what shall Sandi
say to this evil that you do?”
There was no reply, only a snuffling sound of woe.
“Oh, aï!” sobbed the voice.
“M’lama, presently we
shall come to the Mission house where the God-men
are, and I will bring you clothing these
you will put on you,” said Bones, still staring
blankly over the side of the ship at the waters which
foamed past her low hull; “for if my lord Sandi
see you as I see you I mean as I wouldn’t
for the world see you, you improper person,”
he corrected himself hastily in English “if
my lord Sandi saw you, he would feel great shame.
Also,” he added, as a horrible thought made him
go cold all over, “also the lady who comes to
my lord Militini oh, lor!”
These last two words were in English.
Fortunately there was a Jesuit settlement
near by, and here Bones stopped and interviewed the
stout and genial priest in charge.
“It’s curious how they
all do it,” reflected the priest, as he led the
way to his storehouse. “I’ve known
’em to tear up their clothes in an East End
police cell white folk, the same as you
and I.”
He rummaged in a big box and produced certain garments.
“My last consignment from a
well-meaning London congregation,” he smiled,
and flung out a heap of dresses, hats, stockings and
shoes. “If they’d sent a roll or
two of print I might have used them but
strong religious convictions do not entirely harmonize
with a last year’s Paris model.”
Bones, flushed and unhappy, grabbed
an armful of clothing, and showering the chuckling
priest with an incoherent medley of apology and thanks,
hurried back to the Zaïre.
“Behold, M’lama,”
he said, as he thrust his loot through the window of
the little deck-house, “there are many grand
things such as great ladies wear now you
shall appear before Sandi beautiful to see.”
He logged the happening in characteristic
language, and was in the midst of this literary exercise
when the tiny steamer charged a sandbank, and before
her engines could slow or reverse she had slid to the
top and rested in two feet of water.
A rueful Bones surveyed the situation
and returned to his cabin to conclude his diary with
“12.19 struck
a reef off B’lidi Bay. Fear vessel total
wreck. Boats
all ready for lowering.”
As a matter of fact there were neither
boats to lower nor need to lower them, because the
crew were already standing in the river (up to their
hips) and were endeavouring to push the Zaïre
to deep water.
In this they were unsuccessful, and
it was not for thirty-six hours until the river, swollen
by heavy rains in the Ochori region, lifted the Zaïre
clear of the obstruction, that Bones might record the
story of his salvage.
He had released a reformed M’lama
to the greater freedom of the deck, and save for a
shrill passage at arms between that lady and the corporal
she had bitten, there was no sign of a return to her
evil ways. She wore a white pique skirt and a
white blouse, and on her head she balanced deftly,
without the aid of pins, a yellow straw hat with long
trailing ribbons of heliotrope. Alternately they
trailed behind and before.
“A horrible sight,” said
Bones, shuddering at his first glimpse of her.
The rest of the journey was uneventful
until the Zaïre had reached the northernmost
limits of the Residency reserve. Sanders had partly
cleared and wholly drained four square miles of the
little peninsula on which the Residency stood, and
by barbed wire and deep cutting had isolated the Government
estate from the wild forest land to the north.
Here, the river shoals in the centre,
cutting a passage to the sea through two almost unfathomable
channels close to the eastern and western banks.
Bones had locked away his journal and was standing
on the bridge rehearsing the narrative which was to
impress his superiors with a sense of his resourcefulness and
incidentally present himself in the most favourable
light to the new factor which was coming into his daily
life.
He had thought of Hamilton’s
sister at odd intervals and now....
The Zaïre was hugging the western
bank so closely that a bold and agile person might
have stepped ashore.
M’lama, the witch, was both bold and agile.
He turned with open mouth to see something
white and feminine leap the space between deck and
shore, two heliotrope ribbons streaming wildly in
such breeze as there was.
“Hi! Don’t do that
... naughty, naughty!” yelled the agonized Bones,
but she had disappeared into the undergrowth before
the big paddle-wheel of the Zaïre began to
thresh madly astern.
Never was the resourcefulness of Bones
more strikingly exemplified. An ordinary man
would have leapt overboard in pursuit, but Bones was
no ordinary man. He remembered in that moment
of crisis, the distressing propensity of his prisoner
to the “eradication of garments.”
With one stride he was in his cabin and had snatched
a counterpane from his bed, in two bounds he was over
the rail on the bank and running swiftly in the direction
the fugitive had taken.
For a little time he did not see her,
then he glimpsed the white of a pique dress, and with
a yell of admonition started in pursuit.
She stood hesitating a moment, then
fled, but he was on her before she had gone a dozen
yards; the counterpane was flung over her head, and
though she kicked and struggled and indulged in muffled
squeaks, he lifted her up in his arms and staggered
back to the boat.
They ran out a gangway plank and across
this he passed with his burden, declining all offers
of assistance.
“Close the window,” he
gasped; “open the door now, you naughty
old lady!”
He bundled her in, counterpane enmeshed
and reduced to helpless silence, slammed the door
and leant panting against the cabin, mopping his brow.
“Phew!” said Bones, and
repeated the inelegant remark many times. All
this happened almost within sight of the quay on which
Sanders and Hamilton were waiting. It was a very
important young man who saluted them.
“All correct, sir,” said
Bones, stiff as a ramrod; “no casualties except
as per my nose which will be noted in the margin of
my report one female prisoner secured after
heroic chase, which, I trust, sir, you will duly report
to my jolly old superiors ”
“Don’t gas so much, Bones,”
said Hamilton. “Come along and meet my
sister hullo, what the devil’s that?”
They turned with one accord to the forest path.
Two native policemen were coming towards
them, and between them a bedraggled M’lama,
her skirt all awry, her fine hat at a rakish angle,
stepped defiantly.
“Heavens!” said Bones,
“she’s got away again.... That’s
my prisoner, dear old officer!”
Hamilton frowned.
“I hope she hasn’t frightened
Pat ... she was walking in the reservation.”
Bones did not faint, his knees went
from under him, but he recovered by clutching the
arm of his faithful Ali.
“Dear old friend,” he
murmured brokenly, “accidents ... error of judgment
... the greatest tragedy of my life....”
“What’s the matter with
you?” demanded Sanders in alarm, for the face
of Bones was ghastly.
Lieutenant Tibbetts made no reply,
but walked with unsteady steps to the lock-up, fumbled
with the key and opened the door.
There stepped forth a dishevelled
and wrathful girl (she was a little scared, too, I
suspect), the most radiant and lovely figure that had
ever dawned upon the horizon of Bones.
She looked from her staggered brother
to Sanders, from Sanders to her miserable custodian.
“What on earth ” began
Hamilton.
Then her lips twitched and she fell
into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.
“If,” said Bones huskily,
“if in an excess of zeal I mistook... in the
gloamin’, madame ... white dress....”
He spread out his arms in a gesture
of extravagant despair.
“I can do no more than a gentleman....
I have a loaded revolver in my cabin ... farewell!”
He bowed deeply to the girl, saluted
his dumbfounded chief, tripped up over a bucket and
would have fallen but for Hamilton’s hand.
“You’re an ass,”
said Hamilton, struggling to preserve his sense of
annoyance. “Pat this is Lieutenant
Tibbetts, of whom I have often written.”
The girl looked at Bones, her eyes moist with laughter.
“I guessed it from the first,” she said,
and Bones writhed.