Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 26).djvu/16

6                     THE STRAND MAGAZINE. us in and a stifling smell of wood-smoke shot me from dreamland into the heart of the present awkward realities.

I wanted to know particulars about the interview with Ruora.

“I’ll tell you. He asked what brought us across the path of the Lion, and under the feet of the Forest Elephant, and fumbling among the reeds where the mighty Rhinoceros slept. I told we had witchcraft to scare away danger.

“‘What sort of witchcraft?’ he says, rubbing the big flies off his eyelids. “I told him it was a hat-devil, and after a lot of talk (for I had to work up their feelings, you know, Anson) I showed him the hat folded up. Ruora grabbed it and put it on the top of his wool and had his wives out to see how becoming it was.

“After they’d tickled his vanity a bit he turned sulky and wanted to know where the witchcraft came in. I said the hat could make itself big or make itself small. I talked a good deal about that hat, I own, Anson.

“Make it jump big,’ he roared out. I explained it wanted an offering given to it first.

“It was something to see old Dropsy bang his stick and bellow. He’s rubbed cold fear into the livers of those blacks, I tell you, Anson. They stood there in the scalding sun and fairly shivered.

“To make the story short, I worked that hat for all it was worth. Ruora’s an ill- favoured savage, but there’s nothing tawdry about his notion of bargaining. He began with wives, then he rose to cattle. I pushed

him up to ivory. But that’s too heavy to take with us just now, so I said the hat was a white man’s hat and the devil liked white man’s talk. With that he pulled out the diamonds. He has them slung in a little bag under his armpit.”

As Tammers and I talked the darkness was thinning away, and the short-lived silence of African village life was already giving place to intermittent sounds of movement about the huts.

“Ruora was awfully taken with the way the hat snapped up into a tile,” Tammers went on. “He was set on wearing it.”

“Did he take the hat by force?” I asked. “No, no; he gave me seven diamonds for it. I’d call it handsome if he’d not made a point of our staying over for the feast to-