CHAPTER XIX

THE MAKER OF LAWS

The discovery made as to the source of Deadman’s Pool gave a new interest to the valley, and the boys played the role of detectives under an arrangement to report the results of their investigations at night.  Each spent a day of careful observation, and at the camp-fire each wore a look of preoccupation.

“Any success?”

They nodded their heads.

“I met the chief’s mother at the council tree,” said Mr. Hume, “and she said she would pay us a visit in the morning.  She has been ill, or she would have come before.”

“Well,” said Venning, “I met a boy five minutes after I left the cave, and he stuck to me like a leech.”

“One followed me also,” muttered Compton.

“Seems to me we are under police inspection.”

“Yes; there were boys everywhere.”

“Anyway, I found a ‘splash’ beetle.”

“Eh!”

“A beetle that has developed the protective instinct till it looks like a splash of white on a rock.  Here it is;” and Venning displayed his find.

“Doesn’t help us much.”

“No; but when I took it off the rock I could hear a faint rumbling from below, over here to the left, between our gorge and the canon where the river disappears.”

“Come, that’s something.”

“Yes; but as far as I could make out, there was not an opening in the cliff on that side big enough to hold a swallow’s nest.”

“Better luck to-morrow.  Now, lads, if that old woman puts any leading questions about the pool, don’t give yourselves away.”

But when the chief’s mother came up the next day, she never breathed a word about the pool.  She talked of the “good white man” who had lived in the cave when Muata was a boy.

“Often have I sat here and talked with him, and well do I remember his teaching.”

“Let us hear, mother,” said Compton.

“He taught us how to till the land, so that it would produce other crops than manioc.  The men he showed how to win iron from the rock, and how to forge the spear-heads and the hoes for the tilling.  Medicine he made from the leaves and the juices of the trees, and he bade the women keep clean the huts and the place around the village.  But the thing he said most was that living here in peace, in a place set aside for the weak, it was well we saw that no strangers who came in should ever leave.  For, said he, the strong will take from the weak.”

“This is a small place,” said Venning—­“too small for any people to fight over.”

“I thought I heard the sound of battle in the valley but two days since.”

“It might serve Hassan as a robber’s den; but I spoke of other people—­white men, mother.”

“Since I had ears to hear the meaning of words,” she said, “the talk was ever of white men, and one ‘white man’ warned us against those very men who eat up the land and the waters.”