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Updated: June 13, 2025
Whereupon his forces were divided, and each chief ransacked his land for delicacies to feed them. It was a long palaver too long for the chiefs. Was the island Akasava or Isisi? Old men of either nation testified with oaths and swearings of death and other high matters that it was both.
He beckoned the three men who had come down from the Akasava as bearers of the invitation. "Say again what your master desires," he said. "Thus speaks N'gori, and I talk with his voice," said the spokesman, "that you shall cut down the devil-stick which Sandi planted in our midst, for it brings shame to us, and also to M'fosa the son of our master."
For two days the chiefs of the Akasava and the Isisi were satisfied with the justice of an award which robbed them both without giving an advantage to either. Then an uneasy realization of their loss dawned upon them. Then followed a swift exchange of messages and Bosambo's colonization scheme was unpleasantly checked.
It had come to be a by-word of the people when they discussed their lord with greater freedom than he could have wished, the tyranny of Bosambo was better than the tyranny of Akasava. Amongst the Ochori chiefs, greater and lesser, only one was conspicuous by his failure to carry proper offerings to his lord.
A sobered Akasava city woke up and rubbed its eyes to find strange Ochori sentinels in the street and Bosambo in a sky-blue table-cloth, edged with golden fringe, stalking majestically through the high places of the city. "This I do," said Bosambo to a shocked N'gori, "because my lord Sandi placed me here to hold the king's peace."
It is the custom on the Akasava district to hold a ghost palaver to which the learned men of all tribes are invited, and the palaver takes place in the village of Ookos by the edge of the forest.
Now it is the fact that had Sanders died in the execution of his duty, died either from fever or as the result of scientific torturing at the hands of Akasava braves, less than a couple of lines in the London Press would have paid tribute to the work he had done or the terrible manner of his passing.
Yet he kept a tight hold upon himself, and by a supreme effort of will showed no sign of his perturbation. The palaver was of little value to Bones; the village was blandly innocent of murder or knowledge of murder. There was little short of open mockery and defiance when they pointed out certain indications that went to prove that this man was not of the Akasava, but of the higher Isisi.
His last words, shouted from the bridge of the Zaire as her stern wheel went threshing ahead, were, "Remember, Bones! No shirking!" "Honi soit qui mal y pense!" roared Bones. Hamilton had evidence enough of the effect which the leniency of his subordinate had produced. News travels fast, and the Akasava are great talkers.
Up in the Akasava country a certain wise man named M'bisibi had predicted the coming of a devil-child who should be born on a night when the moon lay so on the river and certain rains had fallen in the forest.
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