Chapter 3

I had just settled down for a comfortable evening over the fire in a
saddle-bag chair drawn up as close to the hearth as the fender would
allow, with a plentiful supply of literature and whisky, and pipe and
tobacco, when the telephone bell rang loudly and insistently. With a
sigh I rose and took up the receiver.

"That you?" said a voice I recognised as that of Jack Bridges. "Can I
come round and see you at once? It's most important. No, I can't tell
you now. I'll be with you in a few minutes."

I hung the receiver up again, wondering what business could fetch Jack
Bridges round at that time of the evening to see me. We had been the
greatest of pals at school and at the 'Varsity, and had kept the
friendship up ever since, despite my intermittent wanderings over the
face of the globe. But during the last few days or so Jack had become
engaged to Miss Glanville, the daughter of old Glanville, of South
African fame, and as a love-sick swain I naturally expected to see very
little of him, until after the wedding at any rate.

At this time of the evening, according to my ideas of engaged couples,
he should be sitting in the stalls at some theatre, and not running
round to see bachelor friends with cynical views on matrimony.

I had not arrived at a satisfactory solution when the door opened and
Jack walked in. One glance at his face told me that he was in trouble,
and without a word I pushed him into my chair and handed him a drink.
Then I sat down on the opposite side of the fire and waited for him to
begin, for a man in need of sympathy does not want to be worried by
questions.

He gulped down half his whisky and sat for a moment gazing into the
fire.

"Jim, old man," he said at length, "I've had awful news."

"Not connected with Miss Glanville?" I asked.

"In a way, yes. It's broken off, but there's worse than that--far worse.
I can hardly realise it; I feel numbed at present; it's too horrible.
You remember that when you and I were at Winchester together my father
was killed during the Matabele War?"

I nodded.

"Well," continued Jack, "I heard to-day that he was not killed by the
Matabele, but was hanged in Bulawayo for murder. In other words, I am
the son of a murderer."

"Hanged for murder!" I exclaimed in horror. "Surely there's some
mistake?"

"No," groaned Jack, "it's true enough. I've seen the newspaper cutting
of the time, and I'm the son of a murderer, who was also a forger, a
thief, and a card-sharper. Old Glanville told me this evening. It was
then that our engagement was broken off."

"Your mother?" I asked. "Have you seen her?"

Jack nodded.

"Poor little woman!" he groaned. "She has known all along, and her one
aim and object in life has been to keep the awful truth from me. That
was why I was told he died an honourable death during the war. I've
often wondered why the little mother was always so sad, and so weighed
down by trouble. Now I know. Good God, what her life must have been!"

He rose from his chair and paced up and down the room for a minute; then
he stopped and stood in front of me, his face working with emotion.

"But I don't believe it, Jim," he said, and there was a ring in his
voice. "I don't believe it, and neither does the little mother. It's
impossible to reconcile the big, bluff man with the heart of a child,
that I remember as my father, with murder, forgery, or any other crime.
And yet, according to Glanville and the old newspapers he showed me,
Richard Bridges was one of the most unscrupulous ruffians in South
Africa. In my heart of hearts I know he didn't do it, and though on the
face of it there's no doubt, I'm going to try and clear his name. I am
sailing for South Africa on Friday."

"Sailing for South Africa!" I exclaimed. "What about your work?"

"My work can go hang!" replied Jack heatedly. "I want to wipe away the
stain from my father's name, and I mean to do it somehow. That's why
I've run round to see you, old pal, for I want you to come with me.
Knowing Rhodesia as you do, you're just the man to help me. Say you'll
come?" he pleaded.

It seemed quite the forlornest hope I had ever heard of, but Jack's
distress was so acute that I hadn't the heart to refuse.

"All right, Jack," I said, "I'm with you. But don't foster any vain
hopes. Remember, it's twenty years ago. It will be a pretty tough job to
prove anything after all these years."

During the voyage out we had ample time to go through the small amount
of information about the long-forgotten case that Jack had been able to
collect from the family solicitors.

In the year 1893, Richard Bridges, who was a mining engineer of some
standing, had made a trip to Rhodesia with a view to gold and diamond
prospecting. He had been accompanied by a friend, Thomas Symes, who, so
far as we could ascertain, was an ex-naval officer; and the two, after a
short stay at Bulawayo, had gone northward across the Guai river into
what was in those days a practically unknown land. In a little over a
year's time Bridges had returned alone--his companion having been, so he
stated, killed by the Matabele, and for six months or so he led a
dissolute life in Bulawayo and the district, which ended ultimately in
his execution for murder. There was no doubt whatever about the murder,
or the various thefts and forgeries that he was accused of, as he had
made a confession at his trial, and we seemed to be on a wild-goose
chase of the worst variety so far as I could see; but Jack, confident of
his father's innocence, would not hear of failure.

"It's impossible to make surmises at this stage," he said. "On the face
of it there appears to be little room for doubt, but no one who knew my
father could possibly connect him with any sort of crime. Somehow or
other, Jim, I've got to clear his name."

My memory went back to a tall, sunburnt man with a kindly manner who had
come down to the school one day and put up a glorious feed at the tuck
shop to Jack and his friends. Afterwards, at his son's urgent request,
he had bared his chest to show us his tattooing of which Jack had,
boy-like, often boasted to us. I recalled how we had gazed admiringly at
the skilfully worked picture of Nelson with his empty sleeve and closed
eye and the inscription underneath: "England expects that every man this
day will do his duty." Jack had explained with considerable pride that
this did not constitute all, as on his father's back was a wonderful
representation of the _Victory_, and on other parts of his body a lion,
a snake, and other _fauna_, but Richard Bridges had protested laughingly
and refused to undress further for our delectation.

We reached Bulawayo, but no one in the city appeared to recall the case
at all; indeed, Bulawayo had grown out of all recognition since Richard
Bridges had passed through it on his prospecting trip. It was difficult
to know where to start. Even the police could not help, and had no
knowledge of where the murderer had been buried. No one but an old
saloon-keeper and a couple of miners could recollect the execution even,
and they, so far as they could remember, had never met Richard Bridges
in the flesh, though his unsavoury reputation was well known to them.

In despair, Jack suggested a trek up country towards Barotseland, which
was the district that Bridges and Symes had proposed to prospect,
though, according to all accounts, Symes had been murdered by the
Matabele before they reached the Guai river.

For the next month we trekked steadily northwards, having very fair
sport; but, as I expected, extracting no information whatever from the
natives about the two prospectors who had passed that way years before.
At length, Jack became more or less reconciled to failure, and realising
the futility of further search suggested a return to Bulawayo. As our
donkey caravan was beginning to suffer severely from the fly, I
concurred, and we started to travel slowly back to Bulawayo, shooting by
the way.

One night after a particularly hard trek we inspanned at an old _kraal_,
the painted walls of which told that at one time it had served as a
royal residence, and as I had shot an eland cow that afternoon, which
provided far more meat than we could consume, we invited the induna and
his tribe to the feast. Not to be outdone in hospitality, the old chief
produced the kaffir beer of the country, a liquid which has nothing to
recommend it beyond the fact that it intoxicates rapidly.

A meat feast and a beer drink is a great event in the average kaffir's
life, and as the evening wore on a general jollification started to the
thump of tomtoms and the squeak of kaffir fiddles. There was one very
drunk old Barotse, who sat close to me, and, accompanying himself with
thumps on his tomtom, sang in one droning key a song about a man who
kept snakes and lions inside him, and from whose chest the evil eye
looked out. At least, so far as I could gather that was roughly the gist
of the song; but as his tomtom was particularly large and most obnoxious
I politely took it away from him, and Jack and I used it as a table for
our gourds of kaffir beer, which we were pretending to consume in large
quantities.

A gourd, however, is a top-heavy sort of drinking vessel, and in a very
short time I had succeeded in spilling half a pint or so of my drink on
the parchment of the drum. Not wishing to spoil the old gentleman's
plaything, which he evidently valued above all things, I mopped up the
beer with my handkerchief, and in doing so removed from the parchment a
portion of the accumulated filth of ages.

"Hullo!" said Jack, taking the instrument from me and holding it up to
the firelight. "There's a picture of some sort here. It looks like a man
in a cocked hat."

He rubbed it hard with his pocket handkerchief, and the polishing
brought more of the picture to light, till, plain enough in places and
faded in others, there stood out, the portrait of a man in an
old-fashioned naval uniform with stars on his breast, and underneath
some letters in the form of a scroll.

"That's not native work," I exclaimed. "These are English letters," for
I could distinctly make out the word "man" followed by a "t" and an "h."
"Rub it hard, Jack."

The grease on the parchment refused to give way to further polishing,
however, and remembering a bottle of ammonia I kept for insect bites, I
mixed some with kaffir beer and poured it on the head of the tomtom. One
touch of the handkerchief was sufficient once the strong alkali got to
work, and out came the grand old face of Nelson and underneath his
motto:

"England expects that every man this day will do his duty."

Jack dropped the drum as if it had bitten him.

"What does it mean?" he gasped. "My father had this on his chest. I
remember it well!"

I was, however, too busy with the reverse end of the drum to heed him.
On the other side the ammonia brought out a picture of the _Victory_,
with the head of a roaring lion below it.

"Good God!" exclaimed Jack. "My father had that on his back. Quick, Jim,
rub hard! There should be the family crest to the right--an eagle with a
snake in its talons and R. B. underneath."

I rubbed in the spot indicated, and out came the crest and initials
exactly as Jack had described them. There was something horribly uncanny
and gruesome in finding the tattoo marks of the dead man on the
parchment of a Barotse tomtom two hundred miles north of the Zambesi,
and for a moment I was too overcome with astonishment to grasp exactly
what it meant. Then it came to my mind in a flash that the parchment was
nothing else than human skin, and Richard Bridges' skin at that. I put
it down with sudden reverence, and, beckoning to its owner, demanded its
full history. At first he showed signs of fear, but promising him a
waist length of cloth if he told the truth, he squatted on his hams
before us and began.

"Many, many moons ago, before the white men came to trade across the Big
Water as they do now, two white baases came into this country to look
for white stones and gold. One baas was bigger than the other, and on
his chest and on his body were pictures of birds, and beasts, and
strange things. On his chest was a great inkoos with one eye covered,
and on his back a hut with trees growing straight up into the air from
it. On his loins was a lion of great fierceness, and coiled round his
waist was a hissing mamba (snake). We were sore afraid, for the white
baas told us he was bewitched, and that if harm came to either he would
uncover the closed eye of the great inkoos upon his chest, which was the
Evil Eye, and command him to blast the Barotse and their land for ever.

"So the white men were suffered to come and go in peace, for we dreaded
the Evil Eye of the great inkoos. They toiled, these white baases,
digging in the hillside and searching the riverbed; and then one day it
came to pass that they quarrelled and fought, and the baas with the
pictures was slain. We knew then that his medicine was bad medicine,
otherwise the white baas without the pictures could not have killed him.
So we were wroth and made to slay the other baas, but he shot us down
with a fire stick and returned to his own country in haste. Then did I
take the skin from the dead baas, for I loved him for his pictures, and
I made them into a tomtom. I have spoken."

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Jack when I had translated the story. "Then my
father was killed here in Barotseland, and it was Symes, his murderer,
who went back to Bulawayo. It was that fiend Symes, also, who took my
father's name, probably to draw any money that might have been left
behind, and who, as Richard Bridges, was hanged for murder. Poor old
dad," he added brokenly, "murdered, and his body mutilated by savages!
But how glad I am to know that he died an honest man!"

With the evidence at hand it was easy to prove the identity of the
murderer of twenty years ago, and, having settled the matter
satisfactorily and cleared the dead man's name, Jack and I returned to
England, where a few weeks later I had to purchase wedding garments in
order that I might play the part of best man at Jack's wedding.