The Leopard Woman

by Stewart Edward White

"Bring grass," he ordered.

The request was repeated outside in Swahili, and turned into a strange tongue. Kingozi heard many feet hurrying away.

He stood supporting the half-fainting form of the Leopard Woman. Her head rested against his shoulder. Her eyes were closed, her muscles had all gone slack, so that her body felt soft and warm. Kingozi, waiting, remembered her as she had looked the evening of his call--silk-clad, lithe, proud, with blood-red lips, and haughty, fathomless eyes, and the single jewel that hung in the middle of her forehead. Somehow at this moment she seemed smaller, in her safari costume, and helpless, and pathetic. He felt the curve of her breast against him, and the picture of her as he had seen her out there in the Thirst arose before his eyes. At that time it had not registered: he was too busy about serious things. But now, while he waited, the incident claimed, belated, his senses. His antagonism, or distrust, or coldness, or suspicion, or indifference, or whatever had hardened him, disappeared. He stared straight before him at the lantern, allowing these thoughts and sensations to drift through him. Subconsciously he noted that the lamp flame showed a halo, or rather two halos, one red and one green. By experience he knew that this portended one of his stabbing headaches through the eyes. But the thought did not hold him. He contemplated unwaveringly the spectacle of this soft, warm, helpless but indomitable piece of femininity fronting the African wilderness unafraid. Unconsciously his arms tightened around her, drawing her to him. She gave no sign. Her form was limp. Apparently she was either half asleep or in a stupor. But had Kingozi looked down when he tightened his arms, instead of staring at the halo-encircled lantern, he would have seen her glance sidewise upward into his face, he would have discerned a fleeting smile upon her lips.

Almost immediately the people were back with armfuls of the long grass that grows on the edge of mountainous country. Under Kingozi's directions they heaped it at one side. He assisted the Leopard Woman to this improvised couch and laid her upon it. She seemed to drop instantly asleep.

They brought more grass and piled it in another place. Mali-ya-bwana superintended these activities zealously. He had drunk his fill, had bolted a chunk of goat's flesh one of the savages had handed him, now he was ready to fulfil his bwana's commands.

"You will eat?" he asked.

But Kingozi was not hungry. His strong desire was for a tall balauri of hot tea, but this could not be. He knew it Was unsafe to drink the water unboiled--it is unsafe to drink any African water unboiled--but this time it could not be helped. He was not even very tired, though his eyes burned. There was nothing more to do. Kingozi knew that Simba and Cazi Moto would not attempt to come in.

They now had both food and water, and would camp somewhere out on the plain.

"I will sleep," he decided.

Mali-ya-bwana at once thrust the savages outside, without ceremony, peremptorily. When the bwana of an African belonging to the safari class wants anything, the latter gets it for him. The headman of the author of these lines went single handed and stopped in its very inception a royal n'goma, or dance, to which men had come a day's journey, merely because his bwana wanted to sleep! Kingozi was here alone, in a strange country, for the moment helpless; but Mali-ya-bwana hustled the tribesmen out as brusquely as though a regiment were at his back. Which undoubtedly had its effect.