Slayer by Stealth

By Wilton Hazzard

"Slayer by Stealth" is an absorbing story by Nelson S. Bond written for the Wilton Hazzard pseudonym, an occasional house name of the Fiction House Magazines, used chiefly for sports-related fiction. Its gripping plot, intriguing characters, and Bond's unique style will make it an engaging read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2021
• ISBN: 4064066465681

Book preview

Wilton Hazzard

Slayer by Stealth

Published by Good Press, 2022

[e-mail]

EAN 4064066465681

Table of Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Text

THE RIVER gleamed like polished jade. Tangled lianas streamed out from walls of jungle into the broad, slow current. Ripples of green slime turned up by the high prows of the canoes folded back on themselves and were still. Occasionally a gossamer of butterflies, caught in the rays of the setting sun, hovered over the heads of the canoe-boys like a multi-colored veil floating in a breeze.

A tall Makua of classic physique stood in the bow of the foremost of the three canoes, shielding his eyes against the glare of the sun. Just as it sank into the green depths of the river, he pointed ahead and shouted:

Mahango, Bwana!

Mahango—Mahango!

The crews of the following canoes repeated his shout. Then a lively chant was started, breaking the brooding silence. The canoe-boys rose to one knee and drove their paddles into the green slime. The bowman began to beat time with two halves of a coconut shell. The canoe lurched from side to side and there was a wild joyous play of muscles as the crews raced for an out jutting bend in the river. Spray from the flying paddles slapped into Gordon Corby's face as he crawled from under the rattan shelter amidships.

Mahango was situated a few miles East of the triangle formed by the Gazaland-Transvaal-Rhodesian border at the confluence of the Limpopo and Muanetsi rivers. It was, therefore, a strategically placed factory, and the most Westerly post under the Companhia de Mocambique.

As the Company's senior agent, it was Corby's job to inspect the isolated factories and to see to it that the petty black despots who held sway along the banks of the great jungle waterway, kept the treaties they had made with the chartered company.

Trouble shooting along the Limpopo was apt to be more than a mere figure of speech in Corby's day. Portuguese control of the remote districts was more nominal than effective. The Makuas were still restless after the revolt under Gungunhana, or as many thought, Corby among them, under the real leadership of the Zanzibar Arab Sef Mejid, Gungunhana's viser whose grasping ambition had reached out for the whole of Gazaland and whose cowardly desertion in the hour of crisis had brought war and death to the Makuas.

Corby himself had taken a spear-thrust from the doughty Makua war chief when at long last he had been brought to bay and had died as he had lived, killing men with the utmost enthusiasm. His great war drum had been silent now for ten years, but not the tongues that extolled him. He died to the long grief of his tribe. A truly great man, the Makuas said, so brave and of such infallible power that a