Lieutenant Bones by Edgar Wallace — Read

In a country where gossip runs from village to village as quickly as fire flicks from straw to straw you may maintain a small force of spies, and yet never know of most important events which happen almost at your front door. For, though your native man, and no less your native woman, is a born gossip, there are certain secret things about which he does not talk, and there was a time when half the Akasava was fighting half the Isisi and no one was the wiser, because both sides had tacitly agreed that the riparian villages which were directly under the white man's eye should preserve the semblance of peacefulness, and Akasava and Isisi folk bartered and traded with one another on the beaches, and men went from one country to another in perfect security, though ten miles in the interior the flower of their fighting-men were at death-grips.

Thereafter Mr. Commissioner Sanders was wont to probe into the "bush", sending small parties of Houssas on long journeys into the forest, to test the condition of public sentiment. Further than this he made it known in grand palaver that the sins of the interior should be visited upon the river villages, and that he would exact reprisals of a peculiarly drastic character whenever these -- to the native mind -- innocent deceptions were practised,