Adventure Magazine Cover, December 18, 1919 — page 61: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Shehu Wants an Armorer 47 negroid—intelligent enough to admire white man’s science and ingenuity and to wonder at the great steel bridge. More- over, Issou had a flattering awe of Tim himself, whom he addressed as “O Strong White Man Learned in the Magic of Metals.” The extraordinary friendship between the giant smith and the weazened trouba- dour was now three months old and had originally been brought about by Tim’s curiosity. Tim hadn’t the ghost of a suspicion that the weazened troubadour he found in the village strumming on a gilau—a gourd with two gut strings and ‘dried seeds inside, which Issou rolled to imitate the patter of rain on foliage, the rustle of wind in the treetops, the sigh of the river, cries of children, or what- ever the story he chanted called for— had any ulterior motive when he sought the smith’s friendship by offering him a kola nut. Such an offer is the have-one- on-me of West Africa. At first their intercourse was restricted to wild, pantomimic gestures which Tim mistook for the sign language, but later Issou took to patiently instructing Tim in the Kanuri tongue. At first Tim was merely amused, then curious, then inter- ested and, eventually, victimized by the stfange quest which Issou gradually insinuated into the smith’s bottomless - credulity. “D’ye mean to say, Issou,” gasped Tim, “that this shehu of N’dele will give me for just a couple of head-loads of old hoop-iron all the land I can encom- pass in walking between sunrise and sun- set P” : Tim had to translate it laboriously into Kanuri and found he had not got it quite right. With the patience of an African stalking his quarry, the troubadour ex- plained that the hoop-iron was dash, which is to say the customary present expected by an African chief from a visitor. Sunrise-to-sunset domain was open to any claimant. _ Had Tim’s brains measured up to his brawn he might have been excited to know what value there was in rusting old hoop-iron to make it worthy a shehu’s _ dash, but he was just then interested in this sunrise-to-sunset domain. + “Yeh,” he nodded. “In white man’s country any nut can homestead a hun- SW 2 ~ - = a a 5 BS es Mh nyt Sas a <=. > : yet 4 Cee Cee ee eS ae oe ee a a, oe ee i See oe ae dred and sixty acres of sage-brush that nobody else wants.” Then had Issou. laid his black, cun- ning, inscrutable eyes on Tim and breathed a prayer. “May Allah grant thee vision of the date oasis by the wells.” Tim got the vision all right. It seized on his mind and soul and grew and grew in magnitude and desirableness. In a word he was hypnotized—hooked hard and fast. = Ae ee as he went through the village he felt he might be finding ~ freedom from three meals a day and the time-clock. He dreamed of adventure through the strange tribes and countries so alluringly fabled in Issou’s minstrelsy, At the end of the hut-lane he glanced back to make sure that he was unob- served by any of his fellow workers and then gliding into the bush to Issou, who was bundling the hoop-iron into two head-loads for two blacks hired as car- riers. Here Tim quickly doffed hat, coat, trousers and shoes for turban, burnoose and sandals. .He-wound a fold of the turban across the lower half of his face, exposing only the eyes. He must do this to filter his breathing of the harmat- tans’ sands, said Issou. The fold also hid effectually his white face, a very necessary disguise, if only Issou had been frank about it, for they were ‘to cross northern Nigeria, where British residents. might exhibit an un- comfortable interest in a white man trav- eling in company with a mendicant trou- badour. Issou would then have been put on the carpet, and Tim might have learned that his African friend was the rascally recruiting agent of the shehu of ‘N’dele (endeelee) and that the shehu was in dire need of an armorer. The resident might have laughed at the sun- rise-to-sundown domain as sucker-bait and given Tim official warning. Not- that that would have turned Tim back. “Sure,” he would have said, “it’s the shehu’s colonizing scheme.” Tim had been disappointed in the slug- gish Africans of the village; he had yearned for the Africa of the howling dervishes and genuine savages. His wish was granted with heavy-handed generosity. a Seen