It was in a swampy village on the lagoon river behind the Turner Peninsula that Pollock’s first encounter with the Porroh man occurred. The women of that country are famous for their good looks--they are Gallinas with a dash of European blood that dates from the days of Vasco de Gama and the English slave-traders, and the Porroh man, too, was possibly inspired by a faint Caucasian taint in his composition. (It’s a curious thing to think that some of us may have distant cousins eating men on Sherboro Island or raiding with the Sofas.) At anyrate, the Porroh man stabbed the woman to the heart as though he had been a mere low-class Italian, and very narrowly missed Pollock. But Pollock, using his revolver to parry the lightning stab which was aimed at his deltoid muscle, sent the iron dagger flying, and, firing, hit the man in the hand.

He fired again and missed, knocking a sudden window out of the wall of the hut. The Porroh man stooped in the doorway, glancing under his arm at Pollock. Pollock caught a glimpse of his inverted face in the sunlight, and then the Englishman was alone, sick and trembling with the excitement of the affair, in the twilight of the place. It had all happened in less time than it takes to read about it.

The woman was quite dead, and having ascertained this, Pollock went to the entrance of the hut and looked out. Things outside were dazzling bright. Half a dozen of the porters of the expedition were standing up in a group near the green huts they occupied, and staring towards him, wondering what the shots might signify. Behind the little group of men was the broad stretch of black fetid mud by the river, a green carpet of rafts of papyrus and water-grass, and then the leaden water. The mangroves beyond the stream loomed indistinctly through the blue haze. There were no signs of excitement in the squat village, whose fence was just visible above the cane-grass.

Pollock came out of the hut cautiously and walked towards the river, looking over his shoulder at intervals. But the Porroh man had vanished. Pollock clutched his revolver nervously in his hand.

One of his men came to meet him, and as he came, pointed to the bushes behind the hut in which the Porroh man had disappeared. Pollock had an irritating persuasion of having made an absolute fool of himself; he felt bitter, savage, at the turn things had taken. At the same time, he would have to tell Waterhouse--the moral, exemplary, cautious Waterhouse--who would inevitably take the matter seriously. Pollock cursed bitterly at his luck, at Waterhouse, and especially at the West Coast of Africa. He felt consummately sick of the expedition. And in the back of his mind all the time was a speculative doubt where precisely within the visible horizon the Porroh man might be.

It is perhaps rather shocking, but he was not at all upset by the murder that had just happened. He had seen so much brutality during the last three months, so many dead women, burnt huts, drying skeletons, up the Kittam River in the wake of the Sofa cavalry, that his senses were blunted. What disturbed him was the persuasion that this business was only beginning.

He swore savagely at the black, who ventured to ask a question, and went on into the tent under the orange-trees where Waterhouse was lying, feeling exasperatingly like a boy going into the headmaster’s study.

Waterhouse was still sleeping off the effects of his last dose of chlorodyne, and Pollock sat down on a packing-case beside him, and, lighting his pipe, waited for him to awake. About him were scattered the pots and weapons Waterhouse had collected from the Mendi people, and which he had been repacking for the canoe voyage to Sulyma.

Presently Waterhouse woke up, and after judicial stretching, decided he was all right again. Pollock got him some tea. Over the tea the incidents of the afternoon were described by Pollock, after some preliminary beating about the bush. Waterhouse took the matter even more seriously than Pollock had anticipated. He did not simply disapprove, he scolded, he insulted.

“You’re one of those infernal fools who think a black man isn’t a human being,” he said. “I can’t be ill a day without you must get into some dirty scrape or other. This is the third time in a month that you have come crossways-on with a native, and this time you’re in for it with a vengeance. Porroh, too! They’re down upon you enough as it is, about that idol you wrote your silly name on. And they’re the most vindictive devils on earth! You make a man ashamed of civilisation. To think you come of a decent family! If ever I cumber myself up with a vicious, stupid young lout like you again”--

“Steady on, now,” snarled Pollock, in the tone that always exasperated Waterhouse; “steady on.”

At that Waterhouse became speechless. He jumped to his feet.

“Look here, Pollock,” he said, after a struggle to control his breath. “You must go home. I won’t have you any longer. I’m ill enough as it is through you”--

“Keep your hair on,” said Pollock, staring in front of him. “I’m ready enough to go.”

Waterhouse became calmer again. He sat down on the camp-stool. “Very well,” he said. “I don’t want a row, Pollock, you know, but it’s confoundedly annoying to have one’s plans put out by this kind of thing. I’ll come to Sulyma with you, and see you safe aboard”--

“You needn’t,” said Pollock. “I can go alone. From here.”

“Not far,” said Waterhouse. “You don’t understand this Porroh business.”

“How should I know she belonged to a Porroh man?” said Pollock bitterly.

“Well, she did,” said Waterhouse; “and you can’t undo the thing. Go alone, indeed! I wonder what they’d do to you. You don’t seem to understand that this Porroh hokey-pokey rules this country, is its law, religion, constitution, medicine, magic ... They appoint the chiefs. The Inquisition, at its best, couldn’t hold a candle to these chaps. He will probably set Awajale, the chief here, on to us. It’s lucky our porters are Mendis. We shall have to shift this little settlement of ours ... Confound you, Pollock! And, of course, you must go and miss him.”

He thought, and his thoughts seemed disagreeable. Presently he stood up and took his rifle. “I’d keep close for a bit, if I were you,” he said, over his shoulder, as he went out. “I’m going out to see what I can find out about it.”

Pollock remained sitting in the tent, meditating. “I was meant for a civilised life,” he said to himself, regretfully, as he filled his pipe. “The sooner I get back to London or Paris the better for me.”

His eye fell on the sealed case in which Waterhouse had put the featherless poisoned arrows they had bought in the Mendi country. “I wish I had hit the beggar somewhere vital,” said Pollock viciously.

Waterhouse came back after a long interval. He was not communicative, though Pollock asked him questions enough. The Porroh man, it seems, was a prominent member of that mystical society. The village was interested, but not threatening. No doubt the witch-doctor had gone into the bush. He was a great witch-doctor. “Of course, he’s up to something,” said Waterhouse, and became silent.

“But what can he do?” asked Pollock, unheeded.

“I must get you out of this. There’s something brewing, or things would not be so quiet,” said Waterhouse, after a gap of silence. Pollock wanted to know what the brew might be. “Dancing in a circle of skulls,” said Waterhouse; “brewing a stink in a copper pot.” Pollock wanted particulars. Waterhouse was vague, Pollock pressing. At last Waterhouse lost his temper. “How the devil should I know?” he said to Pollock’s twentieth inquiry what the Porroh man would do. “He tried to kill you off-hand in the hut. Now, I fancy he will try something more elaborate. But you’ll see fast enough. I don’t want to help unnerve you. It’s probably all nonsense.”

That night, as they were sitting at their fire, Pollock again tried to draw Waterhouse out on the subject of Porroh methods. “Better get to sleep,” said Waterhouse, when Pollock’s bent became apparent; “we start early to-morrow. You may want all your nerve about you.”

“But what line will he take?”

“Can’t say. They’re versatile people. They know a lot of rum dodges. You’d better get that copper-devil, Shakespear, to talk.”

There was a flash and a heavy bang out of the darkness behind the huts, and a clay bullet came whistling close to Pollock’s head. This, at least, was crude enough. The blacks and half-breeds sitting and yarning round their own fire jumped up, and someone fired into the dark.

“Better go into one of the huts,” said Waterhouse quietly, still sitting unmoved.

Pollock stood up by the fire and drew his revolver. Fighting, at least, he was not afraid of. But a man in the dark is in the best of armour. Realising the wisdom of Waterhouse’s advice, Pollock went into the tent and lay down there.

What little sleep he had was disturbed by dreams, variegated dreams, but chiefly of the Porroh man’s face, upside down, as he went out of the hut, and looked up under his arm. It was odd that this transitory impression should have stuck so firmly in Pollock’s memory. Moreover, he was troubled by queer pains in his limbs.

In the white haze of the early morning, as they were loading the canoes, a barbed arrow suddenly appeared quivering in the ground close to Pollock’s foot. The boys made a perfunctory effort to clear out the thicket, but it led to no capture.

After these two occurrences, there was a disposition on the part of the expedition to leave Pollock to himself, and Pollock became, for the first time in his life, anxious to mingle with blacks. Waterhouse took one canoe, and Pollock, in spite of a friendly desire to chat with Waterhouse, had to take the other. He was left all alone in the front part of the canoe, and he had the greatest trouble to make the men--who did not love him--keep to the middle of the river, a clear hundred yards or more from either shore. However, he made Shakespear, the Freetown half-breed, come up to his own end of the canoe and tell him about Porroh, which Shakespear, failing in his attempts to leave Pollock alone, presently did with considerable freedom and gusto.

The day passed. The canoe glided swiftly along the ribbon of lagoon water, between the drift of water-figs, fallen trees, papyrus, and palm-wine palms, and with the dark mangrove swamp to the left, through which one could hear now and then the roar of the Atlantic surf. Shakespear told in his soft, blurred English of how the Porroh could cast spells; how men withered up under their malice; how they could send dreams and devils; how they tormented and killed the sons of Ijibu; how they kidnapped a white trader from Sulyma who had maltreated one of the sect, and how his body looked when it was found. And Pollock after each narrative cursed under his breath at the want of missionary enterprise that allowed such things to be, and at the inert British Government that ruled over this dark heathendom of Sierra Leone. In the evening they came to the Kasi Lake, and sent a score of crocodiles lumbering off the island on which the expedition camped for the night.

The next day they reached Sulyma, and smelt the sea breeze, but Pollock had to put up there for five days before he could get on to Freetown. Waterhouse, considering him to be comparatively safe here, and within the pale of Freetown influence, left him and went back with the expedition to Gbemma, and Pollock became very friendly with Perera, the only resident white trader at Sulyma--so friendly, indeed, that he went about with him everywhere. Perera was a little Portuguese Jew, who had lived in England, and he appreciated the Englishman’s friendliness as a great compliment.

For two days nothing happened out of the ordinary; for the most part Pollock and Perera played Nap--the only game they had in common--and Pollock got into debt. Then, on the second evening, Pollock had a disagreeable intimation of the arrival of the Porroh man in Sulyma by getting a flesh-wound in the shoulder from a lump of filed iron. It was a long shot, and the missile had nearly spent its force when it hit him. Still it conveyed its message plainly enough. Pollock sat up in his hammock, revolver in hand, all that night, and next morning confided, to some extent, in the Anglo-Portuguese.

Perera took the matter seriously. He knew the local customs pretty thoroughly. “It is a personal question, you must know. It is revenge. And of course he is hurried by your leaving de country. None of de natives or half-breeds will interfere wid him very much--unless you make it wort deir while. If you come upon him suddenly, you might shoot him. But den he might shoot you.

“Den dere’s dis--infernal magic,” said Perera. “Of course, I don’t believe in it--superstition--but still it’s not nice to tink dat wherever you are, dere is a black man, who spends a moonlight night now and den a-dancing about a fire to send you bad dreams ... Had any bad dreams?”

“Rather,” said Pollock. “I keep on seeing the beggar’s head upside down grinning at me and showing all his teeth as he did in the hut, and coming close up to me, and then going ever so far off, and coming back. It’s nothing to be afraid of, but somehow it simply paralyses me with terror in my sleep. Queer things--dreams. I know it’s a dream all the time, and I can’t wake up from it.”

“It’s probably only fancy,” said Perera. “Den my niggers say Porroh men can send snakes. Seen any snakes lately?”

“Only one. I killed him this morning, on the floor near my hammock. Almost trod on him as I got up.”

“Ah!“ said Perera, and then, reassuringly, “Of course it is a--coincidence. Still I would keep my eyes open. Den dere’s pains in de bones.”

“I thought they were due to miasma,” said Pollock.

“Probably dey are. When did dey begin?”

Then Pollock remembered that he first noticed them the night after the fight in the hut. “It’s my opinion he don’t want to kill you,” said Perera--”at least not yet. I’ve heard deir idea is to scare and worry a man wid deir spells, and narrow misses, and rheumatic pains, and bad dreams, and all dat, until he’s sick of life. Of course, it’s all talk, you know. You mustn’t worry about it ... But I wonder what he’ll be up to next.”

“I shall have to be up to something first,” said Pollock, staring gloomily at the greasy cards that Perera was putting on the table. “It don’t suit my dignity to be followed about, and shot at, and blighted in this way. I wonder if Porroh hokey-pokey upsets your luck at cards.”

He looked at Perera suspiciously.

“Very likely it does,” said Perera warmly, shuffling. “Dey are wonderful people.”

That afternoon Pollock killed two snakes in his hammock, and there was also an extraordinary increase in the number of red ants that swarmed over the place; and these annoyances put him in a fit temper to talk over business with a certain Mendi rough he had interviewed before. The Mendi rough showed Pollock a little iron dagger, and demonstrated where one struck in the neck, in a way that made Pollock shiver, and in return for certain considerations Pollock promised him a double-barrelled gun with an ornamental lock.

In the evening, as Pollock and Perera were playing cards, the Mendi rough came in through the doorway, carrying something in a blood-soaked piece of native cloth.

“Not here!” said Pollock very hurriedly. “Not here!”

But he was not quick enough to prevent the man, who was anxious to get to Pollock’s side of the bargain, from opening the cloth and throwing the head of the Porroh man upon the table. It bounded from there on to the floor, leaving a red trail on the cards, and rolled into a corner, where it came to rest upside down, but glaring hard at Pollock.

Perera jumped up as the thing fell among the cards, and began in his excitement to gabble in Portuguese. The Mendi was bowing, with the red cloth in his hand. “De gun!” he said. Pollock stared back at the head in the corner. It bore exactly the expression it had in his dreams. Something seemed to snap in his own brain as he looked at it.

Then Perera found his English again.

“You got him killed?” he said. “You did not kill him yourself?”

“Why should I?” said Pollock.

“But he will not be able to take it off now!”

“Take what off?” said Pollock.

“And all dese cards are spoiled!”

“What do you mean by taking off?” said Pollock.

“You must send me a new pack from Freetown. You can buy dem dere.”

“But--’take it off’?”

“It is only superstition. I forgot. De niggers say dat if de witches--he was a witch-- But it is rubbish ... You must make de Porroh man take it off, or kill him yourself ... It is very silly.”

Pollock swore under his breath, still staring hard at the head in the corner.