Adventure Magazine Cover — page 164: what you’re looking at

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

158 with blotches of drab brown scattered through it. His nose had a slight Semitic tendency that. had doubtless descended from his Syrian progenitors. Yuleela was his only wife. The marriage price had been two puncheons of palm oil, a second hand four-paddle canoe, and a cooler (twenty-eight bushels) of kernels that had measured three bushels short. He had considered her cheap at the price. Now, however, he was tired of her. There was too much of the bush cat in her disposi- tion and too little fear of Soliden jn her heart. It was no secret to him that her visit to Myoka-town had been made in the hope of borrowing from her father enough oil to help buy back her freedom. The balance would be furnished by one of Soliden’s own headmen—Hoduna the ax- man. Soliden was not asleep. He heard the commotion caused by the arrival of Gilford and his carriers, and, rising from his mos- quito-curtained bed, he poked his head in- quiringly out of the window-hole of his bedroom. Yuleela was walking toward him and, long before she reached him, he knew that she had returned empty-handed. ““Mas’ Gi’ford come look you,” she said quietly. ‘He go Rawyafa tomorrow time.”’ Soliden cursed Yuleela fluently in Bini, but she paid no heed to that. As Gilford approached, she turned to him and said simply: EoD. be Soliden, sah. I go fix tea. Morn- ing time you catch Rawyafa plenty quick.” Gilford nodded as_ Soliden climbed through the window to shake hands. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Gilford,” the overseer said in his best Lagos-acquired “consulate” English, which was correct enough when he watched every word, but which became broad and thick and choppy when he was not so careful. “I had a touch cf fever this mornin’. But I’sea little better now. Come inside and sit down, sah, till mah wife fixes you tea and a place foh you to sleep.” “Thanks, Soliden, I will. My carriers deserted me yesterday afternoon, but, luckily for me, your wife and her father came to my rescue. Any trouble in this section?” “Trouble, sah?” “Shooting—Bini rebellion—that kind of thing?” Adventure “No, sah. Not a hint of it, sah. We’se quiet as a daid mosquito ’round here, sah.” “Humh!” — Gilford lowered his head to pass into the living-room of Soliden’s hut and clumped into the nearest chair. “One of those boys out there has my cigarets and things. Get them for me, will your And tell him to prepare aay bath water one time.” Soliden, apparently, was only too anxious to please. He did all that could be done to make the new white representative of Marsden & Co. as comfortable as possible and several times expressed his unqualified pleasure that his wife had been fortunate enough to have had the distinguished op- portunity of being of assistance to Mr. Gilford. Gilford did not like Soliden. He did not like his eyes or the odd snaky movements of his long, blunt-fingered hands. And he could readily imagine that Yuleela, upon occasion, had a “rotten time of it”? with so smooth a brute as that. But when Gilford had bathed in a kero- sene can of piping hot water and had par- taken of afternoon tea just as faithfully as at Sapeli, and was topping it off with a leisurely whisky-and-soda, he appreciated the circumstance that Soliden could under- stand straight English. So he offered him a cigaret and said— ‘““My carriers deserting me like that re- minds me of a cousin of mine who got into an odd kind of mess in Port Said.” “Yes, sah. Po’t Said? Where’s dat, sah?” “Er—it’s at one end of the Suez Canal,’ Gilford declared carefully, not being quite sure just which end was the right one. “It’s a filthy hole, full of dives and dens and general indecency and everybody goes there at some time or another.”’ This was not orginal with Gilford. He had heard or read about it somewhere; but Soliden was not up on literature or geog- raphy, so it did not matter very much. He nodded in pretense of understanding what Gilford meant and the latter went on just a little haltingly. “My cousin’s name was Jim, but we always called him Chip. He was the second engineer on a cargo boat out of Hull and as it was his first trip eastward, he made a point of investigating Port Said pretty thoroughly. NOOK C@