This Olandi was a fine animal, tall and broad of shoulder, muscled like an ox, arrogant and pitiless. They called him the native name for leopard because he wore robes of that beast's skin, two so cunningly joined that a grinning head lay over each broad shoulder.
He was a hunter and a fighting man. His shield was of wicker, delicately patterned and polished with copal; his spears were made by the greatest of the N'gombi craftsmen, and were burnished till they shone like silver; and about his head he wore a ring of silver. A fine man in every way.
Some say that he aspired to the kingship of the Akasava, and that Tombili's death might with justice be laid at his door; but as to that we have no means of knowing the truth, for Tombili was dead when they found him in the forest.
Men might tolerate his tyrannies, sit meekly under his drastic judgments, might uncomplainingly accept death at his hands; but no man is so weak that he would take the loss of his favourite wife without fighting, and thus it came about that these men came paddling furiously through the black night.
Save for the "flip-flap" of the paddles, as they struck the water, and the little groan which accompanied each stroke, there was no sound.
They came to the village where Olandi lorded it just as the moon cleared the feathery tops of the N'gombi woods.
Bondondo lay white and silent under the moon, two rows of roofs yellow thatched, and in the centre the big rambling hut of the chief, with its verandah propped with twisted saplings.
The secret man and his brothers made fast their two canoes and leapt lightly to land. They made no sound, and their leader guiding them, they went through the street like ghostly shadows.
Before the chief's hut the embers of a dull fire glowed. He hesitated before the doors. Three huts built to form a triangle composed the chief's habitation. To the right and left was an entrance with a hanging curtain of skins.
Likely as not Olandi slept in the third hut, which opened from either of these.