Adventures Read Free

kind of gloomy thought at that, and I said as much. “Still,” I added, “it's the Christian thing to do.”
    “Maybe you could tell her to turn the other cheek, a fascinating thought in itself,” said Rourke.
    “Well, I suppose we'd at least better make sure she wants to be rescued before we go about upsetting Kitunga,” I suggested.
    “Right,” agreed Rourke. “A person can get used to anything in time. Maybe she's gotten to where she likes being ravished.”
    “A telling point,” I agreed.
    We fell silent for a while, and then an interesting notion hit me.
    “Brother Rourke,” I said, “I think we've been looking at this situation all wrong.”
    “How so?” he asked.
    “Why should a bunch of healthy young bucks want our help ravishing a prisoner?”
    “I hadn't quite gotten around to considering that,” he admitted. “Now that you mention it, it doesn't really make a lot of sense, does it?”
    “It sure as hell don't.”
    “Scientific curiosity, maybe?” he said.
    “Nope,” I said. “I been mulling on it for a couple of minutes now, and it seems to me that if they was choosing partners for this white woman, they'd just naturally choose themselves.”
    “Makes sense,” said Rourke, nodding his head thoughtfully.
    “Well, then, it stands to reason that if bringing us back with them ain't their idea, it must be hers .”
    “Sensible,” muttered Rourke. “Sensible.”
    “And if she's giving orders to a batch of spear-toting heathen like Kitunga and his buddies, she must be a pretty powerful little lady.”
    “Holy shit!” exclaimed Rourke suddenly. “An oversexed white priestess!” He stared up at the clouds, which were covering up the stars as usual, and got a faraway look on his face. “Golden hair down to her waist,” he said, “and breasts like white cantaloupes. Maybe a bracelet or an armband or two...”
    Well, I couldn't see that the picture he was painting was all that much more enticing than a naked white woman staked out spread-eagled on the ground, but I could tell that Rourke didn't want to be bothered none, so I fell to thinking about what kind of tabernacle me and this white priestess could build right here in the bush before we got around to trading ivory and other such trinkets with civilized folks. I didn't know how big her tribe was, but if Kitunga's group was just a foraging party, I figured we'd have an awful lot of manpower able to respond to a terse command or two. As for Burley, I decided that he wasn't such an all-fired bad fellow, and I'd probably let him stick around as a resident witch doctor, so long as he didn't impose on our hospitality too often, like coming over to dinner of a Sunday or asking us to steal a white woman for him too.
    Ten minutes later Rourke was still drawing verbal pictures in the damp night air. By now he'd got her hair down to her ankles, and her breasts were the size of honeydew melons. Seems to me that he'd done away with her armbands, too. He just kept whispering to nobody in particular all night, and by morning he was busy working out the color of her eyes and how narrow her waist was.
    Once the sun came up it got warm enough to start traveling again—no matter how hot the days are in Africa, the nights are enough to convince you that you've wandered into Eskimo country by mistake—and Kitunga gave us each a none-too-gentle nudge with the butt of his spear. We began walking, mostly over open veldtland, but occasionally going through sky-high grasses on old elephant and rhino trails, and I fell to questioning him about the white woman.
    It didn't help much, since Kitunga had just about run through his entire English vocabulary the day before. I couldn't tell how his tribe had come by this woman, or what she looked like, or if she had been there so long she'd forgotten how to speak in a civilized language, or even why she felt the need to make babies. One thing he did let drop that she was a medicine woman, which was probably as