“I didn’t see it all so quick as Brad; he was ahead of me. When he saw the fight among the huts he gave a cry, kind of as if he was hurt. I guess he was. Then his breath seemed to go from him, and he stood up clear on the top of the mound, his arms out, cursing in whispers—because of the ivory.
“That great gold light seemed to beat on him like water. I can’t describe it, mister. He seemed to grow bigger, to tower over the huts, to be as huge as one of the trees. To those poor harried folk in the shadow he must have shown, I take it, like a god, a deliverer,—a saviour—there in the light with his arms spread out. Come to save ’em, eh?
“I give you my word for it, the whole fight was held up while you could count twenty, while they stared up at the great gold figure on the hillock. Then—we was out of arrow-range, but some one had an old breech-loader—Brad he went down coughing. When I ran up, ‘Damn you,’ he groans. ‘Don’t stop here. Get the tusks out, you fool’. . . Yes, he’d forgot I wasn’t supposed to know about them. They was the last thing he thought of, I guess—this side.
“Then . . .?”
He began again with a start. “Then our men from the village rushed up behind me, mad. And we went down. . .
“I don’t remember much else, mister, I never do. Some takes it this way and some that. I got a crack on the head, too, and when I come round a few days after, Brad Timmins he was dead and buried and what you might call canonized. Yes, sir.
“Which way? Well, for coming back at the call of his friend in need, I suppose, and losin’ his life over it. ‘A man of great heart is he who will go into the dark night at the word of his brother,’ said the young headman to me; I believe it says much the same thing in the Bible. . . And the old witch-doctor pipes up, ‘If he was indeed a man, O child!’
“Mister, I saw the beginning of what you and your kind would call a very curious process—the making of a god. Me, I simply didn’t count, though I’d done a lot more than stand on top of a hill in the sunset. Why, I was all blacked up with the back-spit of my old Colt. It’s that way. . . . I went to look at Brad’s grave, and it was all planted round with holy bushes and a mess of rags and feathers and pots and pumpkins. And while I stood there a woman led her little boy up to the grave and set his little black hand like a monkey’s paw on the earth, and said something to Brad. And in two weeks it was rumoured that Brad didn’t like folks round there after dark. And in three it was said that as he stood on the hillock he’d gathered the sun’s rays in his hands and turned them into the blinded faces of Mabendy. Our village had got off uncommon cheap, and it was all laid down to Brad Timmins. ‘Most unreasonable. But it’s that way. . . .
“And the stamp of Brad Timmins was on every white man after that. He became the type—what you’d call the symbol, mister. He, in his grave there, smoothed the way for Raynor. Raynor, he was listened to because of Brad Timmins. You may say the church was built by Brad, and the schools laid on him as a foundation stone. And all the time. . . Well, what gets me is, who’ll have the credit, eh?”
“And the ivory?”