PART FOUR
CHAPTER XXX
THE AVENGER
It was a hot night up at the fort, a night eloquent of the coming rains. The door of the guest house stood open and the light of the paraffin lamp lay upon the veranda and the ground of the yard, forming a parallelogram of topaz across which were flitting continually great moth shadows big as birds.
Andreas Meeus was seated at the white-wood table of the sitting room before a big blue sheet of paper. He held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing just at present; he was reading what he had written.
He was, in fact, making up his three-monthly report for headquarters, and he found it difficult, because the last three months had brought in little rubber and less ivory. A lot of things had conspired to make trade bad. Sickness had swept two villages entirely away; one village, as we know, had revolted; then, vines had died from some mysterious disease in two of the very best patches of the forest. All these explanations Meeus was now putting on paper for the edification of the Congo Government. He was devoting a special paragraph to the revolt of the village by the Silent Pools, and the punishment he had dealt out to the natives. Not a word was said of torture and slaughtering. “Drastic Measures” was the term he used, a term perfectly well understood by the people to whom he was writing.
On the wall behind him the leopard-skin still hung, looking now shrivelled at the edges in this extreme heat. On the wall in front of him the Congo bows and poisoned arrows looked more venomous and deadly than by the light of day. A scorpion twice the size of a penny was making a circuit of the walls just below the ceiling; you could hear a faint scratch from it as it travelled along, a scratch that seemed an echo of Meeus’s pen as it travelled across the paper.
He held between his lips the everlasting cigarette.