and's business, but spent the days preparing for the journey, she
and the nut-brown sprawling child of immense girth, who was the apple
of Bosambo's eye.

So Bosambo had passed down the river as has been described, and four
days after he left there disappeared from the Ochori village ten
brothers in blood of his, young hunting men who had faced all forms of
death for the very love of it, and these vanished from the land and none
knew where they went save that they did not follow on their master's
trail.

Tukili, the chief of the powerful eastern island Isisi, or, as it is
contemptuously called, the N'gombi-Isisi by the riverain folk, went
hunting one day, and ill fortune led him to the border of the Ochori
country. Ill fortune was it for one Fimili, a straight maid of fourteen,
beautiful by native standard, who was in the forest searching for roots
which were notorious as a cure for "boils" which distressed her
unamiable father.

Tukili saw the girl and desired her, and that which Tukili desired he
took. She offered little opposition to being carried away to the Isisi
city when she discovered that her life would be spared, and possibly was
no worse off in the harem of Tukili than she would have been in the hut
of the poor fisherman for whom her father had designed her. A few years
before, such an incident would have passed almost unnoticed.

The Ochori were so used to being robbed of women and of goats, so meek
in their acceptance of wrongs that would have set the spears of any
other nation shining, that they would have accepted the degradation and
preserved a sense of thankfulness that the robber had limited his
raiding to one girl, and that a maid. But with the coming of Bosambo
there had arrived a new spirit in the Ochori. They had learnt their
strength, incidentally they had learnt their rights. The father of the
girl went hot-foot to his over-chief, Notiki, and covered himself with
ashes at the door of the chief's hut.

"This is a bad palaver," said Notiki, "and since Bosambo has deserted us
and is making our marrows like water that we should build him a road,
and there is none in this land whom I may call chief or who may speak
with authority, it seems by my age and by relationship to the kings of
this land, I must do that which is desirable."

So he gathered together two thousand men who were working on the road
and were very pleased indeed to carry something lighter than rocks and
felled trees, and with t