Sanders came in great haste one wet April night when the clouds hung so low over the river that you might have touched them with a fishing-rod.
It was a night of billowing mists, of drenching cloud bursts, of loud cracking thunders and the flicker-flacker of lightning so incessant that only the darkness counted as interval.
Yet, against the swollen stream, drenched to the skin, his wet face set to the stinging rain and the white rod of his searchlight piercing such gloom as there was, Sanders came as fast as stern wheel could revolve for the Akasava land.
He came up to the village of Mi-lanti in the wild grey of a stormy dawn, and such of the huts as the flooding waters of the heavens had spared stood isolated sentinels amidst smoking ruins.
He landed tired and immensely angry, and found many dead men and one or two who thought they were dead. They told him a doleful story of rapine and murder, of an innocent village set upon by the Ochori and taken in its defencelessness. "That is a lie," said Sanders promptly, "for you have stockades, built to the west of the village and your dead are all painted as men paint themselves who prepare long for war. Also the Ochori—such as I have seen—are not so painted, which tells me that they came in haste against a warring people."
The wounded man turned his tired face to Sanders.
"It is my faith," he said, in the conventional terminology of his tribe, "that you have eyes like a big cat."
Sanders attended to his injuries and left him and his pitiful fellows in a dry hut. Then he went to look for Bosambo, and found him sitting patiently ten miles up the river. He sat before a steep hill of rock and undergrowth. At the top of the hill was the chief of the village of Mi-lanti, and with him were such of his fighting men as were not at the moment in a happier world.
"Lord, this is true," said Bosambo, "that this dog attacked my river villages and put my men to death and my women to service. So I came down against him, for it is written in the Sura of the Djinn that no man shall live to laugh at his own evil."
"There will be a palaver," said Sanders briefly, and bade the crestfallen chief, Ofesi, to come down and stack his spears. Since it is not in the nature of the native man to speak the truth when his skin is in peril, it goes without saying that both sides lied fearfully, and Sanders, sifting the truth, knew which side lied the least.