(To be continued)
MANNERING’S MEN
BY MARJORIE L. C. PICKTHALL
IN that town,” said Blake to himself, peering cautiously through the scrub, “is Mannering’s grave, and the wreck of a brave man’s life-work. Oh, Sergeant, if those two beggarly Nyam-Nyams try to run away; deal with them straightly. At moonset we will go down.”
“O sons of Eblis,” murmured the Haussa sergeant with a grin, “scum of the market-place, little frogs of the mud-puddles of Wakonda, in that town is good soured milk, much grain, and chickens and goats as many as the prayers of the prophet. At moonset we will go down.”
The command gurgled pleasantly to itself and lay closer. Blake crawled nearer Macartney, who was raking the silver-patched blackness with a pair of night-glasses wrapped in dark cloth.
“I can make out a tin roof,” whispered Macartney at last; “that will be the roof of the residency.”
“Where Mannering was speared on his own door-step,” said Jim Blake, taking the glasses. “Dead, down and dead, wiped out, an absolute failure, Mannering. I can’t get over that, you know. He was such a keen old beggar, so wrapped up in his work. He simply spent himself on this beastly country. And he cleared out Wakonda, as far as mortal eye can see, on purpose to make room for seven other devils worse than the late king.”
“Couldn’t be,” put in Macartney.