Seekers of the Glittering Fetish: The Complete Adventures of Armless O'Neil, Volume 1 by Dan Cushman

Author:Dan Cushman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Action and Adventure
Publisher: Altus Press

Chapter II

O’NEIL watched with suspicious eyes until Orsenes was out of sight, then he hefted the bundle, poked at its sides, shook it.

Tommy asked, “What the hell do you care what’s inside it? He said it was nothing unlawful, didn’t he?”

O’Neil snorted and flung the bundle down. He was going to leave it there in the doorway, then he thought better of it and carried it inside the storehouse to hide it among some bags of jackass copal.

The two white men sat down and waited. Bobolongonga curled up and snored. The rain stopped, and a few stars came out, casting a subdued glow over the clearing. Still the tom-tom, the popping of the wireless.

A light flashed up in one of the upstairs rooms of the rest house, and then went out again. O’Neil looked at the luminous dial of his pocket watch. Orsenes’ hour was up. They waited another hour, and still no sign of him.

O’Neil stood up. “He doesn’t need to think I’ll take his damned bundle to Kandona without that seventy-five hundred francs advance. I’ll throw it in the bush first.”

Tommy didn’t say anything. He was becoming suspicious of Orsenes, too. The man seemed to be acting in a damned peculiar manner. They roused Bobolongonga and walked through the long, fetid storehouse. From the front door they could see the administrator’s with lights shining through the netted verandahh from its downstairs windows.

They approached and heard a mumble of men’s voices from the verandahh. The peculiar, nasal tones of Orsenes did not seem to be among them.

“We’d better take a look over at the rest house first,” growled O’Neil. “Maybe he’s over there, waiting for us with the light off.”

O’Neil climbed the front steps and shouted for the houseboy. No one answered. The boy was probably over at that reeking voodoo shack, distilling black powers from the dust of his ancestors.

He felt around and located the matches in a can on the table. The generator of the petrol lamp was still warm, and the mantle caught the first try, hissing up with a good, white light. Tommy muttered something and took a backward step. O’Neil turned to look.

There was a man sprawled out on the stairs, head down, one arm outflung, the other twisted behind him at a grotesque angle, his head far to one side.

The man was Orsenes. Dead.

O’Neil bent over him. He had not been shot, or knifed, nor strangled. There was only one small smear of blood—and that was from his nostrils. On his forehead was a small welt, but not enough for concussion. It was his twisted way of lying there that told O’Neil what had killed him.

“Broken back,” he said to Tommy.

“The fall?”

“No, though I guess somebody wanted it to look that way.”

“Oh, the devil, O’Neil—”

“I saw a porter up at Kivva whose back had been snapped the same way. He was carrying film to a movie operator making a gorilla shot, when one of the monsters got wind of him. He ran, but mister gorilla got there first.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.