The Dark Angel by Seabury Quinn

Author:Seabury Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2018-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

23. Pursuit

THERE WAS NO SCARCITY of offered labor when we debarked at Monrovia. A shouting, sweating, jostling throng of black boys crowded round us, each member of the crowd urging his own peculiar excellence as a baggage-carrier in no uncertain terms. Foremost—and most vocal—was a young man in long and much soiled nightgown, red slippers and very greasy tarboosh. “Carry luggage, sar? Carry him good; not trust dam’ bush nigger!” he asseverated, worming with serpentine agility through the pressing crowd of volunteers and plucking Ingraham’s sleeve solicitously.

“Right; carry on, young feller,” the Englishman returned, kicking his kit toward the candidate for partnership.

“Hi-yar, this way—grab marster’s duffle!” the favored one called out, and from the crowd some half-dozen nondescript individuals sprang forward, shouldered our gear and, led by the man Ingraham had engaged, preceded us at a shuffling jog-trot up the winding street toward the apology for a hotel.

Evidently Ingraham was familiar with conventions, for when we had arrived at our hotel he made no effort to distribute largess among the porters, but beckoned to the head man to remain in our room while the remainder of the gang dispersed themselves in such shade as offered in the street outside, awaiting the emergence of their leader.

The moment the door closed a startling transformation came over our chief porter. The stooping, careless bearing which marked his every movement fell from him like a cloak, his shoulders straightened back, his chin went up, and heels clicked together, he stood erectly at attention before Ingraham. “Sergeant Bendigo reporting, sar,” he announced.

“At ease,” commanded Ingraham. Then: “Did you go out there?”

“Yes, O Hiji, even as you ordered, so I did. Up to the place where all of the great waters break in little streams I went, and there at the old camp where ghosts and djinn and devils haunt the night I found the tribesmen making poro. Also, O Hiji, I think the little leopards are at large again, for in the night I heard their drums, and once I saw them dancing round a fire while something—wah, an unclean thing, I think—stewed within their pots. Also, I heard the leopard scream, but when I looked I saw no beast, only three black feller walking through a jungle path.”

“U’m? Any white men there?” demanded Ingraham.

“Plenty lot, sar. No jolly end. Plenty much white feller, also other feller with dark skin, not white like Englishman or French, not black like bush boy or brown like Leoni, but funny-lookin’ feller, some yeller, some brown, some white, but dark and big-nosed, like Jewish trading man. Some, I think, are Hindoos, like I see sometime in Freetown. They come trekking long time through the jungle from Monrovia, ten, twenty, maybe thirty at once, with Liberian bush boys for guide, and—”

“All right, get on with it,” Ingraham prompted sharply.

“Then make killing palaver, Hiji,” the young man told him earnestly. “Those bush boys come as guides; but they not return. They start for home, but something happen—I saw one speared from ambush.

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