Sanders' sake or mine or your own, Bones--but for--well,
for the whole crowd of us--white folk. You'll have to do your best, old
man."

Bones took the other's hand, snivelled a bit despite his fierce effort
of restraint, and went aboard the _Zaire_.

* * * * *

"Tell all men," said B'chumbiri, addressing his impassive relatives,
"that I go to a great day and to many strange lands."

He was tall and knobby-kneed, spoke with a squeak at the end of his
deeper sentences, and about his tired eyes he had made a red circle with
camwood. Round his head he had twisted a wire so tightly that it all but
cut the flesh: this was necessary, for B'chumbiri had a headache which
never left him day or night.

Now he stood, his lank body wrapped in a blanket, and he looked with
dull eyes from face to face.

"I see you," he said at last, and repeated his motto which had something
to do with monkeys.

They watched him go down the street towards the beech where the easiest
canoe in the village was moored.

"It is better if we go after him and put out his eyes," said his elder
brother; "else who knows what damage he will do for which we must pay?"

Only B'chumbiri's mother looked after him with a mouth that drooped at
the side, for he was her only son, all the others being by other wives
of Mochimo.

His father and his uncle stood apart and whispered, and presently when,
with a great waving of arms, B'chumbiri had embarked, they went out of
the village by the forest path and ran tirelessly till they struck the
river at its bend.

"Here we will wait," panted the uncle, "and when B'chumbiri comes we
will call him to land, for he has the sickness _mongo_."

"What of Sandi?" asked the father, who was no gossip.

"Sandi is gone," replied the other, "and there is no law."

Presently B'chumbiri came sweeping round the bend, singing in his poor,
cracked voice about a land and a people and treasures ... he turned his
canoe at his father's bidding, and came obediently to land....

Overhead the sky was a vivid blue, and the water which moved quickly
between the rocky channel of the Lower Isisi caught something of the
blue, though the thick green of elephant grass by the water's edge and
the overhanging spread of gum trees took away from the clarity of
reflection.

There was, too, a gentle breeze and a pleasing absence of flies, so that
a man might get under the red and white striped awning of the _Zair