Muchini glared at his enemy.
"Yet this way I go, Bosambo," he said huskily, and looked over his shoulder towards his followers.
Bosambo swung round on one heel, an arm and a leg outstretched in the attitude of an athlete who is putting the shot. Muchini threw up his wicker shield and pulled back his stabbing-spear, but he was a dead man before the weapon was poised.
Thus ended the war, and the N'gombi folk went home, never so much as striking a blow for the yellow box which Bosambo claimed for himself as his own personal loot.
At the time, Mr. Commissioner Sanders, C.M.G., was blissfully ignorant of the miraculous happenings which have been recorded. He was wholly preoccupied by the novelty which the presence of Patricia Hamilton offered. Never before had a white woman made her home at the Residency, and it changed things a little.
She was at times an embarrassment.
When Fubini, the witch-doctor of the Akasava, despatched five maidens to change Sandi's wicked heart—Sanders had sent Fubini to the Village of Irons for six months for preaching unauthorized magic—they came, in the language of Bones, "doocedly undressed," and Patricia had beaten a hurried retreat.
She was sometimes an anxiety, as I have already shown, but was never a nuisance. She brought to headquarters an aroma of English spring, a clean fragrance that refreshed the heat-jaded Commissioner and her brother, but which had no perceptible influence upon Bones.
That young officer called for her one hot morning, and Hamilton, sprawling on a big cane chair drawn to the shadiest and breeziest end of the verandah, observed that Bones carried a wooden box, a drawing-board, a pad of paper, two pencils imperfectly concealed behind his large ear, and a water-bottle.
"Shop!" said Hamilton lazily. "Forward, Mr. Bones—what can we do for you this morning?"