The Magic of Fear

by Edgar Wallace

The
Magic of Fear
by
Edgar Wallace

The story of a maiden terribly wise in the ways of ancient sorcery

TERE was once an Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs who had risen from the ranks of the lesser politicians by the force of his personality and the great charm and eloquence of his many public speeches.

This Nickerson Haben married a rich widow, who most providentially died at the crisis of his affairs, and when her friends were whispering of the divorce suit she was bringing. It was a very prosaic case of an appendicitis operation that did not go well. To the astonishment of the greatest of English surgeons, and at a period when she should have been out of danger, she suffered a collapse and died. Whereupon the sympathetic colleagues of Mr. Under-Secretary Haben found an excuse for sending him to the River Territories—that vast hinterland which was governed by Mr. Commissioner Sanders, one Captain of Houssas and a youthful lieutenant whose name was Tibbetts but who was invariably called “Bones.”

The ministry felt that the change would be beneficial to the grief-stricken man, who seemed inconsolable even by the immense fortune which his wife had left to him—her new will, which left him nothing, being unsigned.

So he set forth for the Territories by the first available boat, and because this lank and pallid man had a “streak of commonness in him” (his dead wife had often said this to her most intimate friends), he did not warn the officials of the big river that he was honoring them with a visit. Mr. Haben was of the type who set traps for possibly dishonest servants, and suspected his chauffeur of being in league with the garage man to rob him. And he thought it likely that arriving unannounced, he might be in a position to discover certain irregularities which would be hidden away if his coming was widely advertised.

As it happened, his furtiveness introduced no scandal, though, had Sanders of the River the gift of forevision, he might well have taken Agasaka, the Chimbiri woman, and hidden her deep in her native forest.

Agasaka was very closely linked with the life and fate of Mr. Nickerson Haben, though this he did not dream. Mr. Haben was dressed by the best tailor in Savile Row—Agasaka wore no clothes at all except for the kilt of dried grass which hung from her beautiful waist.

A tall maiden, very slim of body and very grave of eyes, no lover for any man, having a great love for something more imponderable than man; terribly wise too, in the ways of ghosts and devils; straight-backed, small-breasted, beloved of children, so strong in the arm and skilled in her strength that she could put a spear beyond the range of any young man's throw: this was Agasaka, the Chimbiri woman, daughter of N'kman'kimi, the dead village woodman.

She was elderly for a virgin, being seventeen; had been wooed by men in their every mood. Agasaka had kindness for all, but generosity for none.

She lived with her brother, M'suru, the hunting man, and his women hated her, for she never spoke a lie and was frank to her elderly brother on the matter of their numerous lovers. They would have beaten her, but that they knew the strength of her throwing arm. Where hands did not dare, tongues were more reckless, but none of their mud stuck. Few men were so poor in mind that they would admit others had succeeded where they had failed.

She had lived for many years with her father in the deep of the forest in the abiding place of M'shimba M'shamba, the fearfully boisterous devil who tears up trees with each hand, whilst his mouth drips molten fire; here, also, dwell other mighty ones. N'guro, the headless dog, and Chikalaka-m'bofunga, the eater of moons—indeed all except the Fire Lizard, whose eyes talk death. He is to be found in no one place. N'kema had taught her the mysteries of life and the beginning of life and the ground where life is sown. She knew men in their rawness and in their strength. N'ktema taught her the way in which she might be more wonderful than any other woman; the magic handed down from mouth to mouth—the magic which was old when they laid the first deep stones of the Pyramids. …

MEN were afraid of her; even Oboro, the witch-doctor, avoided her.

For this was her strangest magic: that she had the power to bring before the eyes of men and women that which they desired least to see.

Once, a small chief stalked her by the river path where the grass is chin high, having certain plans with her. And at the right and lonely moment he slipped from cover, dropping his spears in the grass, and caught her by the arms so that, strong as she was, she could not break his hold.

“Agasaka,” he said, “I have a hut in this forest that has never heard a woman's voice—”

He got so far and then, over her silken shoulder, he saw three black leopards walking shoulder to shoulder down the narrow path towards him. Their heads hung low, their golden eyes shone hungrily.

In an instant he released her and fled to his spears. When he turned again, leopards and woman were gone.

Aliki, the huntsman of her village, neither feared nor cared, for he was familiar with magics of all kinds and often walked in the woods communing with devils. One night he saw a vision in the fire, a great red lizard that blinked its heavy eyelids, Aliki looked round his family circle in a cold-blooded search for a victim. Calichi, the fire lizard, is the most benevolent of devils and will accept a deputy for the man or woman to whom, with its red and blinking eyes, it has given its terrible warning of death.

Aliki saw his three wives and his father and an uncle who had come many days' journey on a hunting trip, and none of these, save the youngest wife, was well enough favored for the purpose. Calichi is a fastidious devil; nothing short of the best and the most beautiful will please him. Beyond the group sitting about the red fire and eating from the big pot that stood in the embers, were other groups. The village street of Chimbiri-Isisi runs from the forest to the river, a broad avenue fringed with huts, and before each hut burnt a fire, and about each fire squatted the men and women of the house.

Dark had come; above the tall gum trees the sky was encrusted with bright stars that winked and blinked at Calichi, but more rapidly.

Aliki saw the stars and rubbed his palms in the dust for luck, and at that moment into his vision came the second wife of his neighbor, a tall woman of eighteen, a nymph carved in mahogany, straight and supple of back, naked to the waistline of her grass skirt. And Aliki knew that he had found a proper substitute and said her name under his breath as he caught the lizard's eyes. Thereupon the beast faded and died away, and Aliki knew that the fire-god approved his choice.

Later that night, when Loka, the wife of M'suru the huntsman, went down to the river to draw water for the first wife's needs, Aliki intercepted her.

“There is nobody so beautiful as you, Loka,” he said, “for you have the legs of a lion and the throat of a young deer.”

He enumerated other physical perfections and Loka laughed and listened. She had quarreled that day with the first wife of her husband, and her husband had beaten her. She was terribly receptive to flattery and ripe for adventure.

“Have you no wives, Aliki?” she asked, pleased. “Now, I will give you Agasaka, the sister of my husband, who is very beautiful and has never touched the shoulder of a man.” This she said in spite, for she hated Agasaka, and it is a way of women to praise, to strangers, the qualities of the sisters they loathe.

“As to Agasaka … and wives. …” He made a gesture of contempt. “There is no such wife as you, not even in the hut of the old king beyond the mountains, which are the end of the world,” said Aliki, and Loka laughed again.

“Now I know that you are mad, as M'suru says. Also that you see strange sights which are not there to see,” she said in her deep, gurgling voice. “And not M'suru alone, but all men, say that you have the sickness mongo."

It was true that Aliki was sick and had shooting pains in his head. He saw other things than lizards.

“M'suru is an old man and a fool,” he said. “I have a ju-ju who gives me eyes to see wonders. Come with me into the forest, Loka, and I will tell you magic and give you love such as as old man cannot give.”

She put down her gourd, hiding it in a patch of elephant gnus near the river's edge, and walked behind him into the forest. There, eventually, he killed her. And he lit a fire and saw the lizard, who seemed satisfied. Aliki washed himself in the river and went back to his hut and to sleep.

When he awoke in the morning he was sorry he had killed Loka, for of all the women in the world she had been most beautiful in his eyes. The village was half empty, for Loka's gourd had been found and trackers had gone into the woods searching for her. Her they found; but nobody had seen her walking to death. Some people thought she had been taken by Ochori fishermen, others favored a devil notorious for his amorous tricks. They brought the body back along the village street, and all the married women made skirts of green leaves and stamped the Death Dance, singing, the while, very strangely.

Aliki, squatting before his fire, watched the procession with incurious eyes. He was sorry he had killed the Thing that was carried shoulder high, and, dropping his gaze to the dull fire, was even more sorry, for the hot lizard was leering up at him, his bulging eyelids winking at a great rate.

So he had taken the wrong sacrifice.

His eyes rose … rested on the slim figure of a woman, one hand gripping the door-post of her brother's hut. And there came to Aliki a tremendous conviction.

The lizard had vanished from the heart of the fire when he looked down.

No time was to be lost: he rose and went toward the virgin of Chimbiri.

“I see you, Agasaka,” he said. “Now this is a terrible shame to come to your brother's house, for men say that this woman Loka had a lover who killed her.”

She turned her big eyes slowly towards him. They were brown and filled with marvelous luminosity that seemed to quiver as she looked at him.

“Loka died because she was a fool.” she said, “but he who killed her was a bigger. Her pain is past; his to come. Soon Sandi malaka will come, the brown butcher bird, and he will pick the eyes of the man who did this thing.”

Aliki hated her, but he was clever to nod his agreement.

“I am wise, Agasaka,” he said. “I see wonders which no man sees. Now before Sandi comes with his soldiers, I will show you a magic that will bring this wicked man to the door of your brother's hut when the moon is so and the river is so.”

HER grave eyes were on his; the sound of the singing women was a drone of sound at the far end of the village. A dog barked wheeezily in the dark of the hut and all faces were turned toward the river where the body was being laid in a canoe before before it was ferried to the little middle island where the dead lie in their shallow graves.

“Let us go,” she said, and walked behind him through an uneven field of maize, gained the shelter of the wood behind the village, and by awkward paths reached the outline of the forest, where there was no noise, for this place was too sad for the weaver birds and too near to the habitation of man for the little monkeys which have white beards. Still he walked on until they made a patch of yellow flowers growing in a clearing. Here the trees were very high, and ten men might have stood on one another's heads against the smooth boles, and the top most alone could have touched the lowermost branch.

He stopped and turned. At that second came an uneasy stirring of the tree-tops, a cold wind and the rumbling of thunder.

“Let us sit down,” he said. “First I will talk to you of the women who have loved me, and of how I would not walk before them because of my great thoughts for you. Then we will be lovers—”

“There is no magic in that, Aliki,” she said, and he saw that she was against him and lifted his spear.

“You die; as Loka died, because of the word which the lizard of fire brought to me,” he said, his voice very low, and his shoulder hunched back for the throw.

“I am Loka!” said the girl, and he looked and his jaw dropped. For she was truly Loka, the woman he had killed. Loka, with her sly eyes and long fingers. And she had Loka's way of putting a red flower behind her ear, and Loka's long, satiny legs.

“O ko!” he said in distress, and dropped his spear.

Agasaka bent in the middle and picked it up and in that moment became herself again. There was no flower and her fingers were shorter, and where the sly smile had been was the gravity of death.

“This is my magic,” she said. “Now walk before me, Aliki, killer of Loka, for I am not made for love, but for strange power.”

Without a word the bemused man walked back the way he had come and Agasaka followed, and, following, felt the edge of the spear's broad blade. … Though she touched lightly there was a line of blood on her thumb where blade and skin had met. The wood was growing dark, the wind was alternately a shriek and a whimper of sound.

Near the pool at the edge of the forest, she swung the spear backward over her left shoulder as a cavalry soldier would swing his sword, and he half-turned at the sound of the whistle it made. …

The first wife of her brother was by the pool gathering manioc root from a place where it had been left to soak—the head of Aliki fell at her feet as the first flash of lightning lit the gloom of the world. …

The sun was four hours old when a river gunboat, a white and glittering thing, came round the bluff which is called The Fish, because of its shape. The black waters of the river were piled up around its bows, a glassy hillock of water, tinged red at its edges, for the Zaire was driving against a six-knot current. Every river from the Isisi to the Mokalibi was in spate, and there were sand shoals, where deeps had been, and deeps in the places where the crocodiles had slept open-mouthed the last time Mr. Commissioner Sanders had come that way.

He stood by the steersman, a slim and dapper figure in spotless white, his pith helmet at a rakish angle, for an elephant fly had bitten him on the forehead the night before, and the lump it had induced was painful to the touch. Between his regular white teeth was a long black cheroot. He had breakfasted and an orderly was clearing away the silver coffee pot and the fruit plates. Overhead the sky was a burning blue, but the glass was falling with alarming rapidity and he desired the safe harborage of a deep bank and the shelter of high trees which a little bay south of Chimbiri would give to him.

“Lo'ba, ko'lo ka! A fathom of water by the mercy of God!”

The sleepy-eyed boy sitting in the bow of the boat drew up his wet sounding-rod.

Sanders's hand shot out to the handle of the telegraph and pulled,-and Yoka the engineer sent a clanging acknowledgement.

“Half a fathom.”

Thump!

The boat slowed of itself, its wheel threshing astern, but the nose was in sand and a side swinging current drove the stem round until it was broadside to the sand-reef. Then, as the wheel reversed, the Zaire began to move to wards the right bank of the river, skirting the shoal until the nose found the deep water of the river again.

“Lord,” said the steersman, virtuously annoyed, “this bank has come up from hell, for it has never been here since I was without clothing.”

“Think only of the river, man,” said Sanders, not inclined for gossip.

AND now above the tree tops ahead, Sanders saw the rolling smoke of clouds, yellow clouds that tumbled and tossed, and threw out tawny banners before the wind.

And the still surface of the river was ripped into little white shreds that leapt and scattered in spray. Sanders moved his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, took it out, looked at it regretfully and threw it over the side. His servant was behind him with an oilskin invitingly held; he struggled into the coat, passed his helmet back and took in exchange the sou'wester which he fastened under his chin. The heat was intolerable. The storm was driving a furnace blast of hot air to herald its fury. He was wet to the skin, his clothes sticking to him.

A ribbon of blinding light leapt across the sky, and split into a tracery of branches. The explosion of the thunder was deafening, it seemed as if heavy weight was pressing down on his head; again the flash, and again and again. Now it showed bluely on either bank, vivid blue streaks of light that ran jaggedly from sky to earth. The yellow clouds had become black; the darkness of night was upon the world, a darkness intensified by the ghastly sideways light that came from a distant horizon where the clouds were broken.

“Port,” said Sanders curtly. “Now starboard again—now port!”

They had reached the shelter of the bank as the first rain fell. Sanders sent a dozen men overboard with the fore and aft hawser and made fast to the big gums that grew down to the riverside.

In a second the deck was running with water and the Commissioner's white shoes had turned first to dove-gray and then to slate. He sent for Yoka the engineer, who was also his headman.

“Put out another hawser and keep a full head of steam.” He spoke in coast Arabic, which is a language allowing of many nice distinctions.

“Lord, shall I sound the oopa-oopa?” he asked. “For I see that these thieving Akasava people are afraid to come out into the rain to welcome your lordship.”

Sanders shook his head.

“They will come in their time—the village is a mile away and they would not hear your oopa-oopa!” he said, and went to his cabin to recover his breath. A ninety-knot wind had been blowing into his teeth for ten minutes, and ten minutes is a long time when you are trying to breathe.

The cabin had two long windows, one at each side. That to the left above the settee on which he dropped, gave him a view of the forest path along which, sooner or later, a villager would come and inevitably carry a message to the chief.

The lightning was still incessant; the rain came down in such volume that he might well think he had anchored beneath a small waterfall; but the light had changed, and ahead the black of clouds had become a gray opacity.

Sanders pulled open the doors he had closed behind him; the wind was gusty but weaker. He reached out for a cheroot and lit it, patient to wait. The river was running eight knots; he would need hand-towing to the bch of the village. He hoped they had stacked wood for him. The Chimbiri folk were lazy, and the last time he had tied they showed him a wood stack—green logs and few of them.

His eyes sought the river-side path—and at the critical moment. For he saw eight men walking two and two and they carried on their shoulders a trussed figure.

An electric chrysanthemum burst into blinding bloom as he leapt to the bank—its dazzling petals, twisting every way through the dark clouds, made light enough to see the burden very clearly, long before he reached the path to stand squarely in the way of eight sullen men and the riff-raff which had defied the storm to follow at a distance.

“O men,” said Sanders softly—he showed his teeth when he talked that way—“who are you that you put the ghost mark on this woman's face?”

For the face of their passenger was daubed white with clay. None spoke: he saw their toes wriggling, all save those of one man, and him he addressed.

“M'suru, son of N'kema, what woman is this?”

M'suru cleared his throat.

“Lord, this woman is the daughter of my own mother; she killed Aliki, also she killed first my wife Loka.”

“Who saw this?”

“Master, my first wife, who is a true woman to me since her lover was drowned, she saw the head of Aliki fall. Also she heard Agasaka say, 'Go, man, where I sent Loka, as you know best, who saw me slay her.'”

Sanders was not impressed.

“Let loose this woman that she may stand in my eyes,” he said, and they untied the girl and by his order wiped the joke of death from her face.

“Tell me,” said Sanders.

She spoke very simply and her story was good. Yet …

“Bring me the woman who heard her say these evil things.”

The wife was found in the tail of the procession and came forward important … frightened … for the cold eyes of Sanders were unnerving. But she was voluble when she had discovered her voice.

THE man in the streaming oilskins listened, his head bent. Agasaka, the slim woman, stood grave, unconscious of shame—the grass girdle had gone and she was as her mother had first seen her. Presently the first wife came to the end of her story.

“Sandi, this is the truth, and if I speak a lie may the long-ones take me to the bottom of the river and feed me to the snakes.”

Sanders, watching her, saw the brown skin go dull and gray; saw the mouth open in shocking fear.

What he did not see was the “long one,” the yellow crocodile that was creeping through the grass toward the perjurer, his little eyes gleaming, his wet mouth open to show the cruel white spikes of teeth.

Only the first wife of M'suru saw this, and fell screaming and writhing at her husband's feet, clasping his knees.

Sanders said nothing, but heard much that was in contradiction of the earlier story she had told.

“Come with me, Agasaka, to my fine ship,” he said, for he knew that trouble might follow if the girl stayed with her people. Wars have started for less cause.

He took her to the Zaire; she followed meekly at his heels, though meekness was certainly not in her.

That night came a tired pigeon from headquarters, and Sanders, reading the message, was neither pleased nor sorry.

High officials, especially the arm-chair men, worried him a little, but those he had met were such charming and understanding gentlemen that he had lost some of his fear of them. What worried him more were the reports which reached him from reliable sources of Agasaka's strange powers. He had seen many queer things on the river; the wonder of the lokali that hollowed the tree trunk by which messages might be relayed across a continent was still something of a wonder to him. Magic inexplicable, sometimes revolting, was an every day phenomenon. Some of it was crude hypnotism, but there were higher things beyond his understanding. Many of these had come down through the ages from Egypt and beyond; Abraham had brought practices from the desert lands about Babylon which were religious rites amongst people who had no written language.

The Zaire was steaming for home the next day when he sent for Abiboo, his orderly.

“Bring me this woman of Chimbiri,” he said, and they brought her from the little store-cabin where she was both guest and prisoner.

“They tell me this and that about you, Agasaka,” he said, giving chapter and verse of his authority.

“Lord, it is true,” said Agasaka when he had finished. “These things my father taught me, as his father taught him. For, Lord, he was the son of M'kufusu, the son of Bonfongu-m'lini, tbesonof N'sambi …”

She recited thirty generations before he stopped her—roughly four hundred years.

Even Sanders was staggered, though he had once met an old man of the N'gombi who had lived in the days of Saladin.

“Show me your magic, woman,” he said, and to his surprise she shook her head.

“Lord, this one magic only comes when I am afraid.”

Sanders dropped his hand to his Browning and half drew it from its leather holster.

He was sitting under an awning spread over the bridge. The steersman was at the wheel, in the bow of the kano boy with his long sounding-rod. Purposely he did not look at the woman, fixing his eyes on the steersman's back.

His hand had scarcely closed on the brown grip when, almost at his feet, he saw the one thing in the world that he loathed—an English puff adder, mottled and swollen, its head thrown back to strike.

Twice his pistol banged … the steersman skipped to cover with a yell and left the Zaire yawning in the strong current.

There was nothing … nothing but two little holes in the deck, so close together that they overlapped. Sanders sprang to the wheel and straightened the boat, and then, when the steersman had been called back and the sounding boy retrieved from the cover of the wood pile where he crouched and trembled Sanders returned to his chair, waving away Abiboo, who had arrived, rifle in hand, to the rescue of his master.

“Woman,” said Sanders quietly, “you may go back to your little house.”

And Agasaka went without the evidence of triumph a lesser woman might have felt. He had not looked at her … there was no mesmerism here.

He stooped down and examined the bullet holes, too troubled to feel foolish.

That afternoon he sent for her again and gave her chocolate to eat, talking of her father. She was sitting on the deck at his feet, and once, when he thought he had gained her confidence, he dropped his hand lightly on her head as he had dropped his hand on so many other young heads before.

The puff adder was there—within striking distance, his spade head thrown back, his coils rigid.

Sanders stared at the thing and did not move his hand, and then, through the shining body, he saw the deck planks, and the soft bitumen where plank joined plank, and then the viper vanished.

“You do not fear?” he asked gently.

“Lord … a little; but now I do not fear, for I know that you would not hurt women.”

The Zaire, with its strange passenger, came alongside the residency wharf two hours before sundown on the third day. Captain Hamilton was waiting, a fuming, angry man, for he had been the unwilling host of one who lacked something in manners.

A FIGURE dressed in white stretched languidly in a deep chair, turned his head but did not trouble to rise. Still less was he inclined to exchange the cool of the broad veranda for the furnace of space open to a red-hot sun.

Sanders saw a white face that looked oddly dirty in contrast with the spotless purity of a duck jacket. Two deep, suspicious eyes, a long, untidy whip of hair lying lankly on a high forehead—a pink, almost bloodless mouth.

“You're Sanders?”

Mr. Haben looked up at the trim figure.

“I am the Commissioner, sir,” said Sanders.

“Why weren't you here to meet me—you knew that I was due?”

Sanders was more shocked than nettled by the tone. A coarse word in the mouth of a woman would have produced the same effect. Secretaries and under-secretaries of state were God-like people who employed a macrology of their own, wrapping their reproofs in the silver tissue of stilted diction which dulled the sting of their rebukes.

“Do you hear me, sir?” he asked, impatiently.

Hamilton, standing by, was near to kicking him off the step.

“I heard you. I was on a visit to the Chimbiri country. No notice of your arrival or your pending arrival was received.”

Sanders spoke very carefully; he was staring down at the scowling Nickerson.

Mr. Haben had it on the tip of his tongue to give him the lie. There was, as the late Mrs. Haben had said, a streak of commonness in him; but there was a broader streak of discretion. The gun still hung at the Commissioner's hip; the grip was shiny with use.

“H'm!” said Mr. Under-Secretary Haben, and allowed himself to relax in his chair.

He was clever enough, Sanders found; knew the inside story of the territories; was keen for information. He thought the country was not well run. The system was wrong, the taxes fell short of the highest possible index. In all ways his attitude was antagonistic. Commissioners were lazy people, intent on having a good time and “their shooting.” Sanders, who had never shot a wild beast in his life, save for the pot or to rid himself of a pressing danger, said nothing.

“A thoroughly nasty fellow,” said Hamilton.

But it was at dinner that he touched the zenith of his boorishness. The dinner was bad; he hated palm nut chop; sweet potatoes made him ill; the chicken was tough; the coffee vile. Happily he had brought his own cigars.

Lieutenant Tibbetts, second-in-command of the Houssas, spent that trying hour wondering what would happen to him if he leaned across the table and batted an Under-secretary with a cut-glass salt cellar.

Only Sanders showed no sign of annoyance. Not a muscle of his face moved when Mr. Nickerson Haben made the most unforgivable of all suggestions. He did this out of sheer ignorance and because of that streak of commonness which was his very own.

“A native woman is … a native woman,” said Sanders quietly. “Happily, I have only had gentlemen under my control, and that complication has never arisen.”

Mr. Haben smiled skeptically; he was sourest when he smiled.

“Very noble,” he said dryly, “and yet one has heard of such things happening.”

Hamilton was white with rage. Bones stared open-mouthed, like a boy who only dimly understood. The pale man asked a question and, to the amazement of the others, Sanders nodded.

“Yes, I brought a girl down from Chimbiri,” he said. “She is at present in the Houssa lines with the wife of Sergeant Abiboo. I hardly know what to do with her.”

“I suppose not,” more dryly yet. “A prisoner, I suppose?”

“N-no,” Sanders hesitated; seemed confused in Haben's eyes. “She has a peculiar brand of magic which rather confounds me—”

Here Mr. Nickerson Haben laughed.

“That stuff!” he said contemptuously. “Let me see your magician.”

BONES was sent to fetch her—he swore loudly all the way across the dark square.

“That is what we complain about,” said Mr. Haben in the time of waiting. “You fellows are in the country so long that you get niggerized.” (Sanders winced. “Nigger” is a word you do not use in Africa.) “You absorb their philosophies and superstitions. Magic … good God!”

He waggled his long head hopelessly.

“My poor wife believed in the same rubbish—she came from one of the Southern States—had a black mammy who did wonderful things with chicken bones! …”

Sanders had not credited him with a wife. When he learned that the poor lady had died, he felt that much worse- things could happen to a woman.

“Appendicitis—an operation … fool of a doctor. …” Mr. Haben unbent so far as to scatter these personal items. “As I said before, you people—hum. …”

Agasaka stood in the doorway, “missionary dressed,” as they say. Her figure was concealed in a blue cotton “cloth” wrapped and pinned about her to the height of her breast.

“This is the lady, eh? Come here!” he beckoned her and she came to him. “Let us see her magic … speak to her!”

Sanders nodded.

“This man wishes to see your magic, Agasaka; he is a great chief amongst my people.”

She did not answer.

“Not bad looking,” said Nickerson, and did a thing which amazed these men, for he rose and, putting his hand under her chin, raised her face to his. And there was something in his queer, hard eyes that she read, as we may read the printed word. The streak of commonness was abominably broad and raw-edged.

“You're not so bad for a nig. …”

He dropped his hands suddenly; they saw his face pucker hideously. He was looking at a woman, a handsome woman with deep shadows under her eyes. It was the face he often saw and always tried to forget. A dead white face. She wore a silk nightdress, rather high to the throat. …

And she spoke.

“Won't you wait until the nurse comes back, Nick? I don't think I ought to drink ice-water … the doctor says …”

“Damn the doctor!” said Nickerson Haben between his teeth, and the three men heard him, saw his hand go up holding an imaginary glass, saw his eyes fall to the level of an imaginary pillow.

“I'm sick of you … sick of you! Make a new will, eh? Like hell!”

He stared and stared, and then slowly turned his drawn face to Sanders.

“My wife …” he pointed to space and mumbled the words. “I … I killed her,”

And then he realized that he was Nickerson Haben, Under-Secretary of State, and these were three very unimportant officials—and a black woman who was regarding him gravely. But this discovery of his was just the flash of a second too late.

“Go to your room, sir,” said Sanders, and spent the greater part of the night composing a letter to the Foreign Secretary.