Adventure Magazine Cover, October 1911 — page 55: what you’re looking at

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

A Leak in the Jungle Trade scarf! And that coat had been out on scores of such journeys! Mr. Marshall took it very quietly. “‘Come,” he said. ‘“‘We’ll hold palaver right now.” We walked over and entered the barter store, where a deep and guilty silence held. Mr. Marshall held up the coat. ‘““Who issued this?’”? he demanded. Four ebony clerks yelled with the glee of innocence, ‘‘Prince Mohara, sah!”’ You see, Mohara had always insisted on his title of prince from his fellow clerks, but he didn’t look very princely now. II IF THERE is anything I hate, it is holding palaver. You don’t learn a= anything, but you do get awful headaches. The African considers lying an accomplishment. ‘Through all that after- noon the argument went back and forth, with wholesale accusations, factional lying, sworn alibis and invective, until the sun flamed down the jungle and the river turned to leaden gray. Mr. Marshall dismissed the negroes to the supper-pots, all but Mohara, whose guilt was the one established fact. He ordered Tiny to lock him up in the adobe. Mr. Marshall was afraid of punish- ing Mohara, lest his brother the Emir take offense. That would mean the loss of the Tllorin trade, which would destroy Mr. Marshall’s recovered hope in his fourth bonus, now that the thefts were stopped. Yet, he was too angry to let Mohara escape altogether, so when I told him how, when I came up river, I saw the agent at Abutshi punish a thief by having his hands wound up in crude rubber until they resembled two stumps and then set a saucy piccanniny to feed him before a jeering crowd twice a day for two weeks, Mr. Marshall called to the watchman to bring Tiny. He instructed him to bind Mohara’s hands in gluey lumps. He had some trouble in making the giant understand, but when Tiny at last said, ‘‘I savvy, sah,” we thought he had, both of us for the moment forget- ting the personal trouble between the clerk and whipper. But I noticed a broad grin on Tiny’s flat phiz. Presently Mr. Marshall sniffed and said, ‘“‘Who can be boiling rubber at this time of the night? Are there anyrubber-tradersin?” IOOI At that instant a fearful yell ‘throbbed above the night-singing of the crickets, to end in as sudden and fearful a throttling. It came to me in a second what was hap- pening. “Tiny—Mohara!” I gasped, and ran out and across the compound to where a group of blacks danced excitedly round something on the ground. When I got there, I saw a scene that did not seem human. The naked, dancing figures, looked like demons in the smoky light of flickering torches. On the ground, sitting on his big haunches, was Tiny, with the wretched Mohara held in a vise between his knees, the giant’s dirty loincloth stuffed into his mouth, where it had throttled the yell that startled us. While Tiny’s huge paws held the wrists, Mohara’s hands were plunged into individual pots of boiling rubber. And Tiny’s tongue teased saucily: “You tink you done get Attalia. Bera well, I done teach you sometings!”’ I kicked the pots into a thousand frag- ments and then I saw Mr. Marshall haul Tiny off his victim and heard him call toa native to go to the cook for lard or oil. He had the clerk carried over to the barracks, then sent for his own mattress for him, and himself dressed the tortured hands. Then he left Mohara to the care of his two unintelli- gent wives. We walked soberly back to the house. Mr. Marshall slumped into his seat. “There goes my ghost of a chance in that bonus,’ he said dejectedly; then, ‘““My heavens! what luck!” Presently he raised his head listening, as J, too, was listening, to a tom-tom drumming a message over the swamp—you could pick out the Morse-like taps and pauses. The tom-tom was evidently in the neighboring village. Then down the swamp came an answering tom-tom, a faint drumming, almost drowned by the crickets and at times lost altogether in the cackling half- laugh of a hyena. “There goes the news to Illorin, from tom-tom to tom-tom, down plains, skirting forests, to the palace of Haj Ahmed,” said Mr. Marshall. ‘‘He will be down on us like a whirlwind in about five days!” “Does he think so much of Mohara as that?” I asked. “Any excuse for a palaver if he is spoil- . ing for a fight.” 3 ‘How will you receive him?” But he merely shrugged his shoulders COmiclbook CO