Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 1 (1923-12).djvu/26



ITTLE Africa, this is why some men die.

The man sat down and looked over the haze. Looked in a way that didn't seem to be a look at all. Looked nowhere but into the back of his mind. Somehow it appeared in the hazy African mist he saw, unseeing, lost things—mirages. A lost life perhaps, perhaps lost ambition.

You know, Little Africa, when ambition goes the world ends up and is a blank. And in the haze of all the rest of life there are mirages. Things that we could have done—things for good or bad. Good, mostly, Little Africa. All men mean good—unless there come mirages.

The man sat back on the rough three-pole seat under the veranda of the wattle and daub trading store—and just sat. His gray-black shirt was open almost to the waist, his naked feet were crossed and felt each other, and his toes caressed like a baby's little toes and didn't know they did it. Toes played with toes and flexed and stroked and loved.

Hundreds in pocket, the line cut off six hundred miles below, no shoes, no food. Nothing! The man sat back. Just sat.

"Mouti, M'Lungu. Medicine," a voice came to him.

The man drowsed up, looked at the awful thing before him, with stinking blanket on and wide, congested stomach and pipe stem limbs. Looked and wasn't even interested. What, Little Africa, is the use of being interested in the everyday which you can't help?

"Mouti? What did you eat last? When did you eat last?"

The pitiful Kaffir hag rubbed her stomach with one hand and her ghastly face bravely tried to smile.

"Some donkey skin, M'Lungu. I dug up a donkey that the police shot for horse sickness a moon ago. I boiled some of the skin."

"Um?" the man muttered. "And if there was a God I'd give my soul to that God to be able to help you. But there's no longer a God—up here."

The skeleton woman crouched in trembling hope a few feet from the man. In trusting patience, she dumbly squatted and waited. The man forgot her, forgot her stench, looked to the sizzling haze.

Little Africa, in times of actual stress all mental morals go. It isn't cruelty; it's mutual misery. Six hundred miles