"Live an' let live," pleaded Bones, all of a twitter. "_Esprit de corps_ an' discretion, jolly old captain." Hamilton looked at his subordinate steadily. "He asked to be branded twice in order that you might not be branded once," he said quietly. The girl stared at Bones, and her eyes were full of tears. "Oh, Bones!" she said, with a little catch in her voice, "you ... you are a sportsman." "Carry on," said Bones incoherently, and wept a little at the realization of that magnificent moment. CHAPTER III THE MAKER OF STORMS Everybody knows that water drawn from rivers is very bad water, for the rivers are the Roads of the Dead, and in the middle of those nights when the merest rind of a moon shows, and this slither of light and two watchful stars form a triangle pointing to the earth, the spirits rise from their graves and walk, "singing deadly songs," towards the lower star which is the source of all rivers. If you should be--which God forbid--on one of those lonely island graveyards on such nights you will see strange sights. The broken cooking-pots which rest on the mounds and the rent linen which flutters from little sticks stuck about the graves, grow whole and new again. The pots are red and hot as they come from the fire, and the pitiful cloths take on the sheen of youth and fold themselves about invisible forms. None may see the dead, though it is said that you may see the babies. These the wise men have watched playing at the water's edge, crowing and chuckling in the universal language of their kind, staggering groggily along the shelving beach with outspread arms balancing their uncertain steps. On such nights when M'sa beckons the dead world to the source of all rivers, the middle islands are crowded with babies--the dead babies of a thousand years. Their spirits come up from the unfathomed deeps of the great river and call their mortality from graves. "How may the waters of the river be acceptable?" asks the shuddering N'gombi mother. Therefore the N'gombi gather their water from the skies in strange cisterns of wicker, lined with the leaf of a certain plant which is impervious, and even carry their drinking supplies with them when they visit the river itself. There was a certain month in the year, which will be remembered by all who attempted the crossing of the Kasai Forest to the south of the N'gombi country, when pools and rivulets suddenly dried--so suddenly, indeed, that even the crocodiles, who have an instinct for coming drought, were left high and dry, in some cases miles from the nearest water, and when the sun rose in a sky unflecked by cloud and gave place at nights to a sky so brilliant and so menacing in their fierce and fiery nearness that men went mad.