"Anyway," said Sanders, with his quiet smile, "Bones has filled Bosambo with a passionate desire to emulate Napoleon, and Bosambo has been making tentative inquiries as to whether he can raise an Old Guard or enlist a mercenary army."
"I flatter myself——" began Bones.
"Why not?" said Hamilton, rising. "It's the only chance you'll have of hearing something complimentary about yourself."
"I believe in you, Bones," said a smiling Patricia. "I think you're really wonderful, and that Ham is a brute."
"I'll never, never contradict you, dear Miss Patricia," said Bones; "an' after the jolly old Commissioner has gone——"
"You're not going away again, are you?" she asked, turning to Sanders. "Why, you have only just come back from the interior."
There was genuine disappointment in her eyes, and Sanders experienced a strange thrill the like of which he had never known before.
"Yes," he said with a nod. "There is a palaver of sorts in the Morjaba country—the most curious palaver I have ever been called upon to hold."
And indeed he spoke the truth.
Beyond the frontiers of the Akasava, and separated from all the other Territories by a curious bush belt which ran almost in a straight line for seventy miles, were the people of Morjaba. They were a folk isolated from territorial life, and Sanders saw them once every year and no more frequently, for they were difficult to come by, regular payers of taxes and law-abiding, having quarrels with none. The bush (reputedly the abode of ghosts) was, save at one point, impenetrable. Nature had plaited a natural wall on one side, and had given the tribe the protection of high mountains to the north and a broad swamp to the west.