“I shall not go without you, dear,” said Mrs. Hume.
“Nor I—unless both of you come,” answered Evelyn.
Hume laughed constrainedly.
“You will both obey orders, I hope,” he said, but he did not urge the matter further at the moment.
They were eating their evening meal when the distant tapping of a drum caught their ears. It was not the rhythmical beating of a tom–tom by some musically–inclined bushman. It much more closely resembled the dot and dash code of the Morse alphabet, or that variant of it which Private Thomas Atkins, in a spasm of genius, christened “Umty–iddy.“ Heard in the stillness of the forest, with not a breath of air stirring the leaves of the tallest trees, and even the tawny river murmuring in so low a note that it was inaudible from the mission–house, this irregular drum–beating had a depressing, almost a sinister effect. It jarred on the nerves. It suggested the unseen and therefore the terrible. At all costs they must find out what it signified.
Bambuk was summoned. He was even more distraught than during the fetish performance of two hours earlier.
“Dem Oku drum play Custom tune,” he explained. “Dem Custom mean——”
“Do you savvy what they are saying?” broke in Hume sharply. He did not imagine that his wife had discussed the habits of native potentates with her youthful helper, and even she herself did not know the full extent of the excesses, the sheer lust of bloodshed, hidden under a harmless–sounding word.
“Savvy plenty. Dem drum made of monkey–skin—p’haps other kind of skin—an’ dem ju–ju man say: ‘Come, come! Make sharp dem knife! Come! Load dem gun! Come, den, come! Dem ribber (river) run red wid blood!’ Den dey nail some men to tree an’ make dance.”
The missionary did not check his assistant’s recital. It was best that the women should at least understand the peril in which they were placed. The compound held not more than fifty able–bodied men, and the only arms they possessed were native weapons. Hume’s influence depended wholly on his skill in treating the ailments of the people and his patience in teaching their children not only the rudiments of English but the simpler forms of handicraft. His experience as an African missioner was not of long standing, but from the outset he had consistently refused to own any firearm more deadly than a shotgun. Hitherto he had regarded the Upper Benuë region as a settled and fairly prosperous one. His cherished day–dream was that before he died he might see the pioneer settlement at Kadana transmuted into a well–equipped college and training school, whence Christianity and science might spread their light throughout that part of Africa. It shocked him now to think that all his work might be submerged under a wave of fanaticism, yet he clung to the hope that the warlike preparations of the men of Oku might mean nothing more serious than a tribal quarrel. This had happened once before, and he stepped in as arbitrator. By a liberal distribution of presents, including the whole of the mission stock of wine and brandy, he sent away both parties highly gratified with both his award and his method of arriving at it.