-stained
knife between his teeth, had mutilated horribly a living girl. Little
Papeete had been decapitated just where his skull lay now; the shrieks and
wails of the tortured tore the sky above Berselius; but Adams heard
nothing and saw nothing but Berselius raving amidst the remains.

Bones lay here and bones lay there, clean picked by the vultures and white
bleached by the sun; skulls, jawbones, femurs, broken or whole. The
remains of the miserable huts faced the strewn and miserable bones, and
the trees blew their golden trumpets over all.

As Adams looked from the man who with shrill cries was running about as a
frantic woman runs about, to the bones on the ground, he guessed the
tragedy of Berselius. But he was to hear it in words spoken with the
torrid eloquence of madness.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER XXX

THE AVENGER

It was a hot night up at the fort, a night eloquent of the coming rains.
The door of the guest house stood open and the light of the paraffin lamp
lay upon the veranda and the ground of the yard, forming a parallelogram
of topaz across which were flitting continually great moth shadows big as
birds.

Andreas Meeus was seated at the white-wood table of the sitting room
before a big blue sheet of paper. He held a pen in his hand, but he was
not writing just at present; he was reading what he had written.

He was, in fact, making up his three-monthly report for headquarters, and
he found it difficult, because the last three months had brought in little
rubber and less ivory. A lot of things had conspired to make trade bad.
Sickness had swept two villages entirely away; one village, as we know,
had revolted; then, vines had died from some mysterious disease in two of
the very best patches of the forest. All these explanations Meeus was now
putting on paper for the edification of the Congo Government. He was
devoting a special paragraph to the revolt of the village by the Silent
Pools, and the punishment he had dealt out to the natives. Not a word was
said of torture and slaughtering. "Drastic Measures" was the term he used,
a term perfectly well understood by the people to whom he was writing.

On the wall behind him the leopard-skin still hung, looking now shrivelled
at the edges in this extreme heat. On the wall in front of him the Congo
bows and poisoned arrows looked more venomous and deadly than by the light
of day. A scorpion twice the size of a penny was making a circuit of the
walls