The colored Mrs. Nilssen, of Banana, gave the pink gin cocktails a final brisk up with the swizzle-stick, poured them out with accurate division, and handed the tray to Captain Kettle and her husband. The men drank off the appetizer and put down the glasses. Kettle nodded a word of praise for the mixture and thanks to its concoctor, and Mrs. Nilssen gave a flash of white teeth, and then shuffled away off the veranda, and vanished within the bamboo walls of the pilotage.
Nilssen sank back into his long-sleeved Madeira chair, a perfect wreck of a man, and Kettle sat up and looked at him with a serious face. "Look here," he said, "you should go home, or at any rate run North for a spell in Grand Canary. If you fool with this health-palaver any longer, you'll peg out."
The Dane stared wistfully out across the blue South Atlantic waters, which twinkled beyond the littered garden and the sand beach. "Yes," he said, "I'd like well enough to go back to my old woman in Boston again, and eat pork and beans, and hear her talk of culture, and the use of missionaries, and all that good old homey rot; but I guess I can't do that yet. I've got to shake this sickness off me right here, first."
"And I tell you you'll never be a sound man again so long as you lib for Congo. Take a trip home, Captain, and let the salt air blow the diseases out of you."
"If I go to sea," said the pilot wearily, "I shall be stitched up within the week, and dropped over to make a hole in the water. I don't know whether I'm going to get well anywhere, but if I do, it's right here. Now just hear me. You're the only living soul in this blasted Congo Free State that I can trust worth a cent, and I believe you've got grit enough to get me cured if only you'll take the trouble to do it. I'm too weak to take on the job myself; and, even if I was sound, I reckon it would be beyond my weight. I tell you it's a mighty big contract. But then, as I've seen for myself, you're a man that likes a scuffle."
"You're speaking above my head. Pull yourself together, Captain, and then, perhaps, I'll understand what you want."
Nilssen drew the quinine bottle toward him, tapped out a little hill of feathery white powder into a cigarette paper, rolled it up, and swallowed the dose. "I'm not raving," he said, "or anywhere near it; but if you want the cold-drawn truth, listen here: I'm poisoned. I've got fever on me, too, I'll grant, but that's nothing more than a fellow has every week or so in the ordinary way of business. I guess with quinine, whiskey, and pills, I can smile at any fever in Africa, and have done this last eight years. But it's this poison that gets me."
"Bosh," said Kettle. "If it was me that talked about getting poisoned, there'd be some sense in it. I know I'm not popular here. But you're a man that's liked. You hit it off with these Belgian brutes, and you make the niggers laugh. Who wants to poison you?"
"All right," said Nilssen; "you've been piloting on the Congo some six months now, and so of course you know all about it. But let me know a bit better. I've watched the tricks of the niggers here-away for a good many years now, and I've got a big respect for their powers when they mean mischief."
"Have you been getting their backs up, then?"
"Yes. You've seen that big ju-ju in my room?"
"That foul-looking wooden god with the looking-glass eyes?"
"Just that. I don't know where the preciousness comes in, but it's a thing of great value."
"How did you get hold of it?"
"Well, I suppose if you want to be told flatly, I scoffed it. You see, it was in charge of a passenger boy, who brought it aboard theM'posoat Matadi. He landed across by canoe from Vivi, and wanted steamer passage down to Boma by theM'poso. I was piloting her, and I got my eye on that ju-ju[1]from the very first. Captain Image and that thief of a purser Balgarnie were after it, too, but as it was a bit of a race between us as to who should get it first, one couldn't wait to be too particular."
[1]A ju-ju in West African parlance may be a large carved idol, or merely a piece of rag, or skin, or anything else that the native is pleased to set up as a charm. Ju-ju also means witchcraft. If you poison a man, you put ju-ju on him. If you see anything you do not understand, you promptly set it down as ju-ju. Similarly chop is food, and also the act of feeding. "One-time" is immediately.
"What did you want it for? Did you know it was valuable then?"
"Oh, no! I thought it was merely a whitewashed carved wood god, and I wanted it just to dash to some steamer skipper who had dashed me a case of fizz or something. You know?"
"Yes, I see. Go on. How did you get hold of it?"
"Why, just went and tackled the passenger-boy and dashed him a case of gin; and when he sobered up again, where was the ju-ju? I got it ashore right enough to the pilotage here in Banana, and for the next two weeks thought it was my ju-ju without further palaver.
"Then up comes a nigger to explain. The passenger-boy who had guzzled the gin was no end of a big duke--witch-doctor, and all that, with a record of about three hundred murders to his tally--and he had the cheek to send a blooming ambassador to say things, and threaten, to try and get the ju-ju back. Of course, if the original sportsman had come himself to make his ugly remarks, I'd soon have stopped his fun. That's the best of the Congo Free State. If a nigger down here is awkward, you can always get him shipped off as a slave--soldier, that is--to the upper river, and take darned good care he never comes back again. And, as a point of fact, I did tip a word to the commandant here and get that particular ambassador packed off out of harm's way. But that did no special good. Before a week was through up came another chap to tackle me. He spoke flatly about pains and penalties if I didn't give the thing up; and he offered money--or rather ivory, two fine tusks of it, worth a matter of twenty pounds, as a ransom--and then I began to open my eyes."
"Twenty pounds for that ju-ju! Why, I've picked up many a one better carved for a shilling."
"Well, this bally thing has value; there's no doubt about that. But where the value comes in, I can't make out. I've overhauled it times and again, but can't see it's anything beyond the ordinary. However, if a nigger of his own free will offered two big tusks to get the thing back, it stands to reason it's worth a precious sight more than that. So when the second ambassador came, I put the price down at a quarter of a ton of ivory, and waited to get it."
Kettle whistled. "You know how to put on the value," he said. "That's getting on for £400 with ivory at its present rates."
"I was badly in want of money when I set the figure. My poor little wife in Bradford had sent me a letter by the last Antwerp mail saying how hard-up she was, and the way she wrote regularly touched me."
"I don't like it," Kettle snapped.
"What, my being keen about the money?"
"No; your having such a deuce of a lot of wives."
"But I am so very domesticated," said Nilssen. "You don't appreciate how domesticated I am. I can't live as a bachelor anywhere. I always like to have a dear little wife and a nice little home to go to in whatever town I may be quartered. But it's a great expense to keep them all provided for. And besides, the law of most countries is so narrow-minded. One has to be so careful."
Kettle wished to state his views on bigamy with clearness and point, but when he cast his eyes over the frail wreck of a man in the Madeira chair, he forebore. It would not take very much of a jar to send Captain Nilssen away from this world to the Place of Reckoning which lay beyond. And so with a gulp he said instead: "You're sure it's deliberate poisoning?"
"Quite. The nigger who came here last about the business promised to set ju-ju on me, and I told him to do it and be hanged to him. He was as good as his word. I began to be bad the very next day."
"How's it managed?"
"Don't know. They have ways of doing these things in Africa which we white men can't follow."
"Suspect any one?"
"No. And if you're hinting at Mrs. Nilssen in the pilotage there, she's as staunch as you are, bless her dusky skin. Besides, what little chop I've managed to swallow since I've been bad, I've always got out of fresh unopened tins myself."
"Ah," said Kettle; "I fancied some one had been mixing up finely powdered glass in your chop. It's an old trick, and you don't twig it till the doctors cut you up after you're dead."
"As if I wasn't up to a kid's game like that!" said the sick man with feeble contempt. "No, this is regular ju-ju work, and it's beyond the Belgian doctor here, and it's beyond all other white men. There's only one cure, and that's to be got at the place where the poisoning palaver was worked from."
"And where's that?"
Captain Nilssen nodded down the narrow slip of sand, and mangroves, and nut palms, on which the settlement of Banana is built, and gazed with his sunken eyes at the smooth, green slopes of Africa beyond. "Dem village he lib for bush," he said.
"Up country village, eh? They're a nice lot in at the back there, according to accounts. But can't you arrange it by your friend the ambassador?"
"He's not the kind of fool to come back. He's man enough to know he'd get pretty well dropped on if I could get him in my reach again."
"Then tell the authorities here, and get some troops sent up."
"What'd be the good of that? They might go, or they mightn't. If they did, they'd do a lot of shooting, collect a lot of niggers' ears, steal what there was to pick up, and then come back. But would they get what I want out of the witch-doctor? Not much. They'd never so much as see the beggar. He'd take far too big care of his mangy hide. He wouldn't stop for fighting-palaver. He'd be off for bush, one-time. No, Kettle, if I'm to get well, some white man will have to go up by his lonesome for me, and square that witch-doctor by some trick of the tongue."
"Which is another way of saying you want me to risk my skin to get you your prescription?"
"But, my lad, I won't ask you to go for nothing. I don't suppose you are out here on the Congo just for your health. You've said you've got a wife at home, and I make no doubt you're as fond of her and as eager to provide for her as I am for any of mine. Well and good. Here's an offer. Get me cured, and I'll dash you the ju-ju to make what you can out of it."
Kettle stretched out his fingers. "Right," he said. "We'll trade on that." And the pair of them shook hands over the bargain.
It was obvious, if the thing was to be done at all, it must be set about quickly. Nilssen was an utter wreck. Prolonged residence in this pestilential Congo had sapped his constitution; the poison was constantly eating at him; and he must either get relief in a very short time, or give up the fight and die. So that same afternoon saw Kettle journeying in a dug-out canoe over the beer-colored waters of the river, up stream, toward the witch-doctor's village.
Two savages (one of them suffering from a bad attack of yaws) propelled the craft from her forward part in erratic zig-zags; amidships sat Captain Kettle in a Madeira chair under a green-lined white umbrella; and behind him squatted his personal attendant, a Krooboy, bearing the fine old Coast name of Brass Pan. The crushed marigold smell from the river closed them in, and the banks crept by in slow procession.
The main channels of the Congo Kettle knew with a pilot's knowledge; but the canoe-men soon left these, and crept off into winding backwaters, with wire-rooted mangroves sprawling over the mud on their banks, and strange whispering beast-noises coming from behind the thickets of tropical greenery. The sun had slanted slow; ceibas and silk-cotton woods threw a shade dark almost as twilight; but the air was full of breathless heat, and Kettle's white drill clothes hung upon him clammy and damp. Behind him, in the stern of the canoe, Brass Pan scratched himself plaintively.
Dark fell and the dug-out was made fast to a mangrove root. The Africans covered their heads to ward off ghosts, and snored on the damp floor of the canoe. Kettle took quinine and dozed in the Madeira chair. Mists closed round them, white with damp, earthy-smelling with malaria. Then gleams of morning stole over the trees and made the mists visible, and Kettle woke with a seaman's promptitude. He roused Brass Pan, and Brass Pan roused the canoe-men, and the voyage proceeded.
Through more silent waterways the clumsy dug-out made her passage, where alligators basked on the mudbanks and sometimes swam up from below and nuzzled the sides of the boat, and where velvety black butterflies fluttered in dancing swarms across the shafts of sunlight; and at last her nose was driven on to a bed of slime, and Kettle was invited to "lib for beach."
Brass Pan stepped dutifully over the mud, and Captain Kettle mounted his back and rode to dry ground without as much as splashing the pipeclay on his dainty canvas shoes. A bush path opened out ahead of them, winding, narrow, uneven, and the man with the yaws went ahead and gave a lead.
As a result of exposure to the night mists of the river, Captain Kettle had an attack of fever on him which made him shake with cold and burn with heat alternately. His head was splitting, and his skin felt as though it had been made originally to suit a small boy, and had been stretched to near bursting-point to serve its present wearer.
In the forest, the path was a mere tunnel amongst solid blocks of wood and greenery; in the open beyond, it was a slim alley between grass-blades eight feet high; and the only air which nourished them as they marched was hot enough to scorch the lungs as it was inhaled. And if in addition to all this, it be remembered that the savages he was going to visit were practising cannibals, were notoriously treacherous, were violently hostile to all whites (on account of many cruelties bestowed by Belgians), and were especially exasperated against the stealer of their idol, it will be seen that from an ordinary point of view Captain Kettle's mission was far from appetizing.
The little sailor, however, carried himself as jauntily as though he were stepping out along a mere pleasure parade, and hummed an air as he marched. In ordinary moments I think his nature might be described as almost melancholy; it took times of stress like these to thoroughly brighten him.
The path wound, as all native paths do wind, like some erratic snake amongst the grasses, reaching its point with a vast disregard for distance expended on the way. It led, with a scramble, down the sides of ravines; it drew its followers up steep rock-faces that were baked almost to cooking heat by the sun; and finally, it broke up into fan-shape amongst decrepit banana groves, and presently ended amongst a squalid collection of grass and wattle huts which formed the village.
Dogs announced the arrival to the natives, and from out of the houses bolted men, women, and children, who dived out of sight in the surrounding patches of bush.
The man with the yaws explained: "Dem Belgians make war-palaver often. People plenty much frightened. People think we lib for here on war-palaver."
"Silly idiots!" said Captain Kettle. "Hullo, by James! here's a white man coming out of that chimbeque!"
"He God-man. Lib for here on gin-palaver."
"Trading missionary, is he? Bad breed that. And the worst of it is, if there's trouble, he'll hold up his cloth, and I can't hit him." He advanced toward the white man, and touched his helmet. "Bon jour, Monsieur."
"Howdy?" said the missionary. "I'm as English as yourself--or rather Amurrican. Know you quite well by sight, Captain. Seen you on the steamers when I was stationed at our headquarters in Boma. What might you be up here for?"
"I've a bit of a job on hand for Captain Nilssen of Banana."
"Old Cappie Nilssen? Know him quite well. Married him to that Bengala wife of his, the silly old fool. Well, captain, come right into my chimbeque, and chop."
"I'll have some quinine with you, and a cocktail. Chop doesn't tempt me just now. I've a dose of fever on hand."
"Got to expect that here, anyway," said the missionary. "I haven't had fever for three days now, but I'm due for another dose to-morrow afternoon. Fever's quite regular with me. It's a good thing that, because I can fit in my business accordingly."
"I suppose the people at home think you carry the Glad Tidings only?"
"The people at home are impracticable fools, and I guess when I was 'way back in Boston I was no small piece of a fool too. I was sent out here 'long with a lot more tenderfeet to plant beans for our own support, and to spread the gospel for the glory of America. Well, the other tenderfeet are planted, and I'm the only one that's got any kick left. The beans wouldn't grow, and there was no sort of living to be got out of spreading a gospel which nobody seemed to want. So I had to start in and hoe a new row for myself."
"Set up as a trader, that is?"
"You bet. It's mostly grist that comes to me: palm-oil, rubber, kernels, and ivory. Timber I haven't got the capital to tackle, and I must say the ivory's more to figure about than finger. But I've got the best connection of any trader in gin and guns and cloth in this section, and in another year I'll have made enough of a pile to go home, and I guess there are congregations in Boston that'll just jump at having a returned Congo missionary as their minister."
"I should draw the line at that, myself," said Kettle stiffly.
"Dare say. You're a Britisher, and therefore you're a bit narrow-minded. We're a vury adaptable nation, we Amurricans. Say, though, you haven't told me what you're up here for yet? I guess you haven't come just in search of health?"
Captain Kettle reflected. His gorge rose at this man, but the fellow seemed to have some sort of authority in the village, and probably he could settle the question of Nilssen's ailment with a dozen words. So he swallowed his personal resentment, and, as civilly as he could, told the complete tale as Nilssen had given it to him.
The trader missionary's face grew crafty as he listened. "Look here, you want that old sinner Nilssen cured?"
"That's what I came here for."
"Well, then, give me the ju-ju, and I'll fix it up for you."
"The ju-ju's to be my fee," said Kettle. "I suppose you know something about it? You're not the kind of man to go in for collecting valueless curiosities."
"Nop. I'm here on the make, and I guess you're about the same. But I wouldn't be in your shoes if the people in the village get to know that you've a finger in looting their idol."
"Why?"
"Oh, you'll die rather painfully, that's all. Better give the thing up, Captain, and let me take over the contract for you. It's a bit above your weight."
Kettle's face grew grim. "Is it?" he said. "Think I'm going to back down for a tribe of nasty, stinking, man-eating niggers? Not much."
"Well," said the missionary, "don't get ruffled. I've got no use for quarrelling. Go your way, and if things turn out ugly don't say I didn't give you the straight cinch, as one white man to another in a savage country. And now, it's about my usual time for siesta."
"Right," said Kettle. "I'll siesta too. My fever's gone now, and I'm feeling pretty rocky and mean. Sleep's a grand pick-me-up."
They took off their coats, and lay down then under filmy mosquito bars, and presently sleep came to them. Indeed, to Kettle came so dead an unconsciousness that he afterward had a suspicion (though it was beyond proof) that some drug had been mixed with his drink. He was a man who at all times was extraordinarily watchful and alert. Often and often during his professional life his bare existence had depended on the faculty for scenting danger from behind the curtain of sleep; and his senses in this direction were so abnormally developed as to verge at times on the uncanny. Cat-like is a poor-word to describe his powers of vigilance.
But there is no doubt that in this case his alertness was dulled. The fatigue of the march, his dose of fever, his previous night of wakefulness in the canoe, all combined to undermine his guard; and, moreover, the attack of the savages was stealthy in the extreme. Like ghosts, they must have crept back from the bush to reconnoitre their village; like daylight ghosts, they must have surrounded the trader missionary's hut and peered at the sleeping man between the bamboos of the wall, and then made their entrance; and it must have been with the quickness of wild beasts that they made their spring.
Kettle woke on the instant that he was touched, and started to struggle for his life, as indeed he had struggled many a time before. But the numbers of the blacks put effective resistance out of the question. Four of them pressed down each arm on to the bed, four each leg, three pressed on his head. Their animal faces champed and gibbered at him; the animal smell of them made him splutter and cough.
Captain Kettle was not a man who often sought help from others; he was used to playing a lone-handed fight against a mob; but the suddenness of the attack, the loneliness of his surroundings, and the dejection due to his recent dose of fever, for the first instant almost unnerved him, and on the first alarm he sang out lustily for the missionary's help. There was no answer. With a jerk he turned his head, and saw that the other bed was empty. The man had left the hut.
For a time the captive did not actively resist further. In a climate like that of the Congo one's store of physical strength is limited, and he did not wish to earn unnecessarily severe bonds by wasting it. As it was, he was tied up cruelly enough with grass rope, and then taken from the hut and flung down under the blazing sunshine outside.
Presently a fantastic form danced up from behind one of the huts, daubed with colored clays, figged out with a thousand tawdry charms, and cinctured round the middle by a girdle of half-picked bones. He wafted an evil odor before him as he advanced, and he came up and stood with one foot on Kettle's breast in the attitude of a conqueror.
This was the witch-doctor, a creature who held power of life and death over all the village, whom the villagers suffered to test them with poison, to put them to unnamable tortures, to rob them as he pleased,--to be, in fact, a kind of insane autocrat working any whim that seized him freely in their midst. The witch-doctor's power of late had suffered. The white man Nilssen had "put bigger ju-ju" on him, and under its influence had despoiled him of valuable property. Now was his moment of counter triumph. The witch-doctor stated that he brought this other white man to the village by the power of his spells; and the villagers believed him. There was the white man lying on the ground before them to prove it.
Remained next to see what the witch-doctor would do with his captive.
The man himself was evidently at a loss, and talked, and danced, and screamed, and foamed, merely to gain time. He spoke nothing but Fiote, and of that tongue Kettle knew barely a single word. But presently the canoe-man with the yaws was dragged up, and, in his own phrase, was bidden to act as "linguister."
"He say," translated the man with the yaws, "if dem big ju-ju lib back for here, he let you go."
"And if not?"
He came and stood with one foot on Kettle's breast in the attitude of a conqueror.
The interpreter put a question, and the witch-doctor screamed out a long reply, and then stooped and felt the captive over with his fingers, as men feel cattle at a fair.
"Well?" said Kettle impatiently; "if he doesn't get back the wooden god, let's hear what the game is next?"
"Me no sabbey. He say you too small and thin for chop."
Captain Kettle's pale cheeks flushed. Curiously enough it never occurred to him to be grateful for this escape from a cannibal dinner-table. But his smallness was a constant sore to him, and he bitterly resented any allusion to it.
"Tell that stinking scarecrow I'll wring his neck for him before I'm quit of this village."
"Me no fit," said the linguister candidly. "He kill me now if I say that, same's he kill you soon."
"Oh, he's going to kill me, is he?"
The interpreter nodded emphatically. "Or get dem big ju-ju," he added.
"Ask him how Cappie Nilssen can be cured."
The man with the yaws put the question timidly enough, and the witch-doctor burst into a great guffaw of laughter. Then after a preliminary dance, he took off a little packet of leopard skin, which hung amongst his other charms, and stuffed it deep inside Kettle's shirt.
The interpreter explained: "Him say he put ju-ju on Cappie Nilssen, and can take it off all-e-same easy. Him say you give Cappie Nilssen dis new ju-ju for chop, an' he live for well one-time."
"He doesn't make much trouble about giving it me, anyway," Kettle commented. "Looks as if he felt pretty sure he'd get that idol, or else take the change out of my skin." But, all the same, when the question was put to him again as to whether he would surrender the image, he flatly refused. There was a certain pride about Kettle which forbade him to make concessionary treaties with an inferior race.
So forthwith, having got this final refusal, the blacks took him up again, and under the witch-doctor's lead carried him well beyond the outskirts of the village. There was a cleared space here, and on the bare, baked earth they laid him down under the full glare of the tropical sunshine. For a minute or so they busied themselves with driving four stout stakes into the ground, and then again they took him up, and made him fast by wrists and ankles, spread-eagle fashion, to the stakes.
At first he was free to turn his head, and with a chill of horror he saw he was not the first to be stretched out in that clearing. There were three other sets of stakes, and framed in each was a human skeleton, picked clean. With a shiver he remembered travellers' tales on the steamers of how these things were done. But then the blacks put down other stakes so as to confine his head in one position, and were proceeding to prop open his mouth with a piece of wood, when suddenly there seemed to be a hitch in the proceedings.
The witch-doctor asked for honey--Kettle recognized the native word--and none was forthcoming. Without honey they could not go on, and the captive knew why. One man was going off to fetch it, but then news was brought that the Krooboy Brass Pan had been caught, and the whole gang of them went off helter-skelter toward the village--and again Kettle knew the reason for their haste.
So there he was left alone for the time being with his thoughts, lashed up beyond all chance of escape, scorched by an intolerable sun, bitten and gnawed by countless swarms of insects, without chance of sweeping them away. But this was ease compared with what was to follow. He knew the fate for which he was apportioned, a common fate amongst the Congo cannibals. His jaws would be propped open, a train of honey would be led from his mouth to a hill of driver ants close by, and the savage insects would come up and eat him piecemeal while he still lived.
He had seen driver ants attack a house before, swamp fires lit in their path by sheer weight of numbers, put the inhabitants to flight, and eat everything that remained. And here, in this clearing, if he wanted further proof of their power, were the three picked skeletons lying stretched out to their stakes.
There are not many men who could have preserved their reason under monstrous circumstances such as these, and I take it that there is no man living who dare up and say that he would not be abominably frightened were he to find himself in such a plight. In these papers I have endeavored to show Captain Owen Kettle as a brave man, indeed the bravest I ever knew; but I do not think even he would blame me if I said he was badly scared then.
He heard noises from the village which he could not see beyond the grass. He heard poor Brass Pan's death-shriek; he heard all the noises that followed, and knew their meaning, and knew that he was earning a respite thereby; he even heard from over the low hills the hoot of a steamer's siren as she did her business on the yellow waters of the Congo, in crow flight perhaps not a good rifle-shot from where he lay stretched.
It seemed like a fantastic dream to be assured in this way that there were white men, civilized white men, men who could read books and enjoy poetry, sitting about swearing and drinking cocktails under a decent steamer's awnings close by this barbaric scene of savagery. And yet it was no dream. The flies that crept into his nose and his mouth and his eye-sockets, and bit him through his clothing, and the hateful sounds from the village assured him of all its reality.
The blazing day burnt itself to a close, and night came hard upon its heels, still baking and breathless. The insects bit worse than ever, and once or twice Kettle fancied he felt the jaws of a driver ant in his flesh, and wondered if news would be carried to the horde in the ant-hill, which would bring them out to devour their prey without the train of honey being laid to lure them. Moreover, fever had come on him again, and with one thing and another it was only by a constant effort of will that he prevented himself from giving way and raving aloud in delirium.
It was under these circumstances, then, that the missionary came to him again, and once more put in a bid for the ju-ju which lay at the pilotage. Kettle roundly accused the man of having betrayed him, and the fellow did not deny it with any hope of being believed. He had got to get his pile somehow, so he said: the ju-ju had value, and if he could not get hold of it one way, he had to work it another. And finally, would Kettle surrender it then, or did he want any more discomfort.
Now I think it is not to the little sailor's discredit to confess that he surrendered without terms forthwith. "The thing's yours for when you like to fetch it," he snapped out ungraciously enough, and the missionary at once stooped and cut the grass ropes, and set to chafing his wrists and ankles. "And now," he said, "clear out for your canoe at the river-side for all you're worth, Captain. There's a big full moon, and you can't miss the way."
"Wait a bit," said Kettle. "I'm remembering that I had an errand here. Can you give me the right physic to pull Captain Nilssen round?"
"You have it in that leopard-skin parcel inside your shirt. I saw the witch-doctor give it you."
"Oh! you were looking on, were you?"
"Yes."
"By James! I've a big mind to leave my marks on you, you swine!"
The trader missionary whipped out a revolver. "Guess I'm heeled, sonny. You'd better go slow. You'd--"
There was a rush, a dodge, a scuffle, a bullet whistling harmlessly up into the purple night, and that revolver was Captain Kettle's.
"The cartridges you have in your pocket."
"I've only three. Here they are, confound you! Now, what are you going to do next? You've waked the village. You'll have them down on you in another moment. Run, you fool, or they'll have you yet."
"Will they?" said Kettle. "Well, if you want to know, I've got poor old Brass Pan to square up for yet. I liked that boy." And with that, he set off running down a path between the walls of grasses.
A negro met him in the narrow cut, yelled with surprise, and turned. He dropped a spear as he turned, and Kettle picked it up and drove the blade between his shoulder-blades as he ran. Then on through the village he raged like a man demented. With what weapons he fought he never afterward remembered. He slew with whatever came to his hand. The villagers, wakened up from their torpid sleep, rushed from the grass and wattle houses on every hand. Kettle in his Berserk rage charged them whenever they made a stand, till at last all fled from him as though he were more than human.
Bodies lay upon the ground staring up at the moon; but there were no living creatures left, though the little sailor, with bared teeth and panting breath, stood there waiting for them. No; he had cleared the place, and only one other piece of retribution lay in his power. The embers of a great fire smouldered in the middle of the clearing, and with a shudder (as he remembered its purpose) he shovelled up great handfuls of the glowing charcoal and sowed it broadcast on the dry grass roofs of the chimbeques. The little crackling flames leaped up at once; they spread with the quickness of a gunpowder train; and in less than a minute a great cataract of fire was roaring high into the night.
Then, and not till then, did Captain Kettle think of his own retreat. He put the three remaining cartridges into the empty chambers of his revolver, and set off at a jog-trot down the winding path by which he had come up from the river.
His head was throbbing then, and the stars and the grasses swam before his eyes. The excitement of the fight had died away--the ills of the place gripped every fibre of his body. Had the natives ambushed him along the path, I do not think he could possibly have avoided them. But those natives had had their lesson, and they did not care to tamper with Kettle'sju-juagain. And so he was allowed to go on undisturbed, and somehow or other he got down to the river-bank and the canoe.
He did not do the land journey at any astonishing pace. Indeed, it is a wonder he ever got over it at all. More than once he sank down half unconscious in the path, and up all the steeper slopes he had to crawl animal fashion on all-fours. But by daybreak he got to the canoe, and pushed her off, and by a marvellous streak of luck lost his way in the inner channels, and wandered out on to the broad Congo beyond.
I say this was a streak of luck, because by this time consciousness had entirely left him, and on the inner channels he would merely have died, and been eaten by alligators, whereas, as it was, he got picked up by a State launch, and taken down to the pilotage at Banana.
It was Mrs. Nilssen who tediously nursed him back to health. Kettle had always been courteous to Mrs. Nilssen, even though she was as black and polished as a patent leather boot; and Mrs. Nilssen appreciated Captain Owen Kettle accordingly.
With Captain Nilssen, pilot of the lower Congo, Kettle had one especially interesting talk during his convalescence. "You may as well take that troublesome wooden god for yourself now," said Nilssen. "But, if I were you, I'd ship it home out of harm's way by the next steamer."
"Hasn't that missionary brute sent for it yet?"
Captain Nilssen evaded the question. "I'll never forget what you've done for me, my lad. When you were brought in here after they picked you up, you looked fit to peg out one-time, but the only sane thing you could do was to waggle out a little leopard-skin parcel, and bid me swallow the stuff that was inside. You'd started out to get me that physic, and, by gum, you weren't happy till I got it down my neck."
"Well, you look fit enough now."
"Never better."
"But about the missionary brute?"
"Well, my lad, I suppose you're well enough to be told now. He's got his trading cut short for good. That nigger with the yaws who paddled you up brought down the news. The beggars up there chopped him, and I'm sure I hope he didn't give them indigestion."
"My holy James!"
"Solid. His missionary friends here have written home a letter to Boston which would have done you good to see. According to them, the man's a blessed martyr, nothing more or less. The gin and the guns are left clean out of the tale; and will Boston please send out some more subscriptions, one-time? You'll see they'll stick up a stained-glass window to that joker in Boston, and he'll stand up there with a halo round his head as big as a frying-pan. And, oh! won't his friends out here be resigned to his loss when the subscriptions begin to hop in from over the water."
"Well, there's been a lot of trouble over a trumpery wooden idol. I fancy we'd better burn it out of harm's way."
"Not much," said Nilssen with a sigh. "I've found out where the value comes in, and as you've earned them fairly and squarely, the dividends are yours to stick to. One of those looking-glass eyes was loose, and I picked it out. There was a bit of green glass behind. I picked out the other eye, and there was a bit of green glass at the back of that too."
"Oh, the niggers'll use anything for ju-ju."
"Wait a bit. I'd got my notions as to what that green glass was, and so I toted them in my pocket up and down the river and asked every man who was likely to know a jewel what he thought. They aren't green glass at all. They're emeralds. They're come from the Lord knows where, but that doesn't matter. They're worth fifty pounds apiece at the very lowest, and they're yours, my lad, to do what you like with."
Captain Kettle lay back on his pillow and smiled complacently. "That money'll just set up my Missis nicely in a lodging-house. Now I can go on with my work here, and know that whatever happens she and the kids are provided for."
"Eh, well," said Nilssen with a sigh, "she'll be nicely fixed up now. I wish I could make provision like that for my old women."
Another bullet came silently up out of the distance, and the nigger second engineer of the launch gave a queer little whimper and fell downflop, and lay with his flat nose nuzzling the still warm boiler. A hole, which showed up red and angry against the black wool just underneath his grass cap, made the diagnosis of his injury an easy matter.
The noise of the shot came to them quite a long time afterward, when the little puff of smoke which had spirted up from the distant sandbank had already begun to thin under the sunshine; but it was that gun-crack, and not the sight of the dead engineer, which gave the working negroes their final scare. With loud children's cries, and queer dodgings of fear, they pitched down their working tools, and fled to where the other black soldiers and passengers were lying on the iron floor-plates of the launch, in security below her water-line.
The Belgian Commandant, from his shelter at the other side of the boiler, swore volubly, and Clay, the English doctor, laughed and twanged out a music-hall tune on his banjo. Kettle, intent on getting his vessel once more under command, was for driving the negro crew back to their work by the simple methods peculiar to the British merchant officer. But this Commandant Balliot forbade, and, as he was Kettle's superior in the Congo Free State service, that small mariner had (very much against his grain) to obey.
"We shall have these fellows rebelling next," said the Commandant, "if you push them too hard; and if they join the rest, where shall we be?"
"There are a thousand of your troops in the mutiny already, according to your tally," said Kettle stiffly, "and I don't see that if this hundred joined them it would make much difference to us, one way or the other. Besides," he added, almost persuasively, "if I had the handling of them they would not join the others. They would stay here and do as they were told."
"Captain Kettle," snapped the Commandant, "you have heard my orders. If I have any more of this hectoring spirit from you, I shall report your conduct when we get back to Stanley Pool."
"You may report till you're black in the face," said Kettle truculently; "but if you don't put a bit more backbone into things, you'll do it as a ghost and not as a live man. Look at your record up to date. You come up here at the head of a fine expedition; you set your soldiers to squeeze the tribes for rubber and ivory; they don't bring in enough niggers' ears to show that they've used their cartridges successfully, and so you shoot them down in batches; and then you aren't man enough to keep your grip on them, but when they've had enough of your treatment, they just start in and rebel."
"One man can't fight a thousand."
"You can't, anyway. If the Doc and I had turned up with this launch half an hour later, your excellent troops would have knocked you on the head and chopped you afterward. But I'd like to remind you that we ran in-shore and took you away in spite of their teeth."
"You are very brave," sneered the Commandant, "you and Monsieur le Docteur."
"Well, you see," said Kettle with cheerful insult, "our grandfathers didn't run away at Waterloo, and that gives us something to go upon."
"I put you under arrest," screamed the Belgian. "I will have satisfaction for this later. I--"
"Steady on," said Clay, with a yawn. He put down his banjo, stretched, and stood up. Behind him the bullets pattered merrily against the iron plating. "Why on earth do you two keep on nagging? Look at me--I'm half drunk as usual, and I'm as happy as a lord. Take a peg, each of you, and sweeten your tempers."
They glared at him from each side.
"Now it's not the least use either of you two trying to quarrel with me. We might as well all be friends together for the little time we've got. We've a good deal in common: we're all bad eggs, and we're none of us fit for our billets. Monsieur le Commandant, you were a sous-officier in Belgium who made Brussels too hot to hold you; you come out here, and you're sent to govern a district the size of Russia, which is a lot beyond your weight.
"Friend Kettle, you put a steamer on the ground in the lower Congo; you probably had a bad record elsewhere, or you'd never have drifted to the Congo service at all; and now you're up here on the Haut Congo skippering a rubbishy fourpenny stern-wheel launch, which of course is a lot beneath your precious dignity.
"And I--well, I once had a practice at home; and got into a row over a woman; and when the row was through, well, where was the practice? I came out here because no one will look at me in any other quarter of the globe. I get wretched pay, and I do as little as I possibly can for it. I'm half-seas over every day of the week, and I'm liked because I can play the banjo."
"I don't see what good you're getting by abuse like this," said Kettle.
"I'm trying to make you both forget your silly naggling. We may just as well be cheerful for the bit of time we've got."
"Bit of time!"
"Well, it won't be much anyway. Here's the launch with a hole shot in her boiler, and no steam, drifted hard and fast on to a sandbank. On another bank, eight hundred yards away, are half a regiment of rebel troops with plenty of good rifles and plenty of cartridges, browning us for all they're worth. Their friends are off up stream to collect canoes from those villages which have been raided, and canoes they'll get--likewise help from the recently raided. When dark comes, away they'll attack us, and personally, I mean to see it out fighting, and they'll probably chop me afterward, and the odds are I give some of them bad dyspepsia. About that I don't care two pins. But I don't intend to be caught alive. That means torture, and no error about it." He shivered. "I've seen their subjects after they've played their torture games on them. My aunt, but they were a beastly sight."
The Commandant shivered also. He, too, knew what torture from the hands of those savage Central African blacks meant.
"I should blow up the launch with every soul on board of her," he said, "if I thought there was any chance of their boarding with canoes."
"Well, you can bet your life they'll try it," said Kettle, "if we stay here."
"But how can we move? We can't make steam. And if we do push off this bank, we shall drift on to the next bank down stream."
"That's your idea," said Kettle. "Haven't you got a better?"
"You must not speak to me like that," said Balliot, with another little snap of dignity and passion. "I'm your senior officer."
"At the present rate you'll continue to be that till about nightfall," said Kettle unpleasantly, "after which time we shall be killed, one way or another, and our ranks sorted out afresh."
"Now, you two," said Clay, "don't start wrangling again." He took a bottle out of a square green case, and passed it. "Here, have some gin."
"For God's sake, Doc, dry up," said Kettle, "and pull yourself together, and remember you're a blooming Englishman."
Clay's thin yellow cheeks flushed. "What's the use?" he said with a forced laugh. "'Tisn't as if anybody wanted to see any of us home again."
"I'm wanted," said Kettle, sharply, "by my wife and kids. I've got them to provide for, and I'm not going to shirk doing it. Let me have my own way, and I can get out of this mess; yes, and out of a dozen worse messes on beyond it. The thing's nothing if only it's tackled the right way."
"How shall you set about it," asked the Commandant.
"By giving orders, and taking mighty big care that everybody on this ship carries them out."
Commandant Balliot rubbed at his close, scrubby beard, and bared his teeth viciously. Behind him, from the distant sandbank, the rebel bullets rapped unceasingly at the launch's iron plating. "But I am the senior in rank," he repeated again. "Officially I could not resign the command in your favor."
"Yes, I know. But here's the situation packed small: if you climb up, and do the large, and perch on your blessed rank, we shall probably see this day out, but we certainly sha'n't see another in. You're at the end of your string, and you can't deny it."
"But if you've a suggestion to make which will save us, make it, and I will act."
"No," snapped Kettle. "I'll either be boss and carry out my schemes my own way; or else, if we stay on as we are, I hold my tongue, and you can go on and arrange the funeral."
"If you can get us out of this mess--"
"I've said I can."
"Then I will let you take the command."
"Well and good. In the first place--"
"Wait a minute. I resign to you temporarily; but, understand, even if I wished to, I could not do this officially. When we get down to Leopoldville--when we get down to the next post even--"
"Oh, you can collar the blooming credit," said Kettle contemptuously, "when we do get clear away to any of your own headquarters. I'm not looking for gratitude either from a Belgian or from the Congo Free State. They don't like Englishmen."
"You are not a lovable nation," said Commandant Balliot spitefully.
"Now," said Kettle, thrusting his fierce little face close up to the other, "understand once and for all that I will not have England abused, neither do I take any more of your lip for myself. I'm Captain of the whole of this show now, by your making, and I intend to be respected as such, and hold a full captain's ticket. You'll call me 'sir' when you speak, and you'll take orders civilly and carry them out quick, or, by James! you'll find your teeth rammed down your throat in two twinkles of a handspike. Savvy that?"
The man of the weaker nation subsided. There was no law and order here to fall back upon. There was nothing but unnerving savagery and vastness. The sandbar where their wrecked launch lay was out in the middle of the Congo, perhaps eight miles from the park-like lands which stretched indefinitely beyond either bank. The great river astern of her glared like a mirror under the intolerable sunshine; came up and swirled around her flanks in yellow, marigold-smelling waves; and then joined up into mirror shape again till the eye ached in regarding it. The baking sky above was desolate even of clouds; there was no help anywhere; and on another distant sandbank, where here and there little bushes of powder smoke sprouted up like a gauzy foliage, a horde of barbarous blacks lusted to tear out his life.
In Commandant Balliot's own heart hope was dead. But it seemed that this detestable Englishman had schemes in his head by which their lives might yet be saved.
He had been given a sample of the Englishmen's brazen daring already. After his troops mutinied, and pandemonium reigned in the village where he was quartered, the Englishman had steamed up with his paltry stem-wheel launch, and by sheer dash and recklessness had carried him and his last parcel of faithful men away in spite of the mutineers' teeth.
It was an insane thing to do, and when he had (as senior officer) complimented Kettle on the achievement, the little sailor had coldly replied that he was only carrying out his duty and earning his pay. And he had further mentioned that it was lucky for Commandant Balliot that he was a common, low-down Britisher, and not a fancy Belgian, or he would have thought of his own skin first, and steamed on comfortably down river and just contented himself with making a report. The white engineer of the launch--a drunken Scot--had, it seemed, been killed in the sortie, which, of course, was regretable; but Balliot (who disliked the Scot personally) had omitted to make the proper condolences; and it was at this that Kettle had taken umbrage and turned the nasty edge of his tongue outward.
"Now," said Captain Kettle, "enough time's been wasted. We will start business at once, please. That boiler's got to be mended, first."
"But," said Balliot, "it's under fire all the time."
"I can see that for myself," said the little sailor, "without being reminded by a subordinate who wasn't asked to speak. We take things as we find them, and so it's got to be mended under fire. Moreover, as the chief engineer of this vessel was killed ashore, and the second engineer was shot overboard, there's others that will have to take rating as engine-room officers. Commandant Balliot, have you any mechanics amongst your lot?"
"I have one man who acted as armorer-sergeant. He is very inefficient."
"He must do his best. Can you handle a drill or a monkey wrench, yourself?"
"No."
"Then I shall find you a laborer's job. Doc, are you handy with tools?"
"Only with those of my own trade," said Clay. "I'm pretty inefficient all round," he added, with a shrug, "or else I shouldn't be here."
"Very well," said Kettle, "then I'll rate myself chief engineer." He got up, and walked round to where the black second engineer, the last man shot, still nuzzled the boiler plates exactly in the same position where he had first fallen. He lifted one of the man's arms, and let it go. It jerked back again like a spring.
"Well, Daddy," he said, "you didn't take long to get stiff. They shot you nice and clean, anyway. I guess we'll let the river and the crocodiles bury you." With a sharp heave, he jerked the rigid body on to the rail, and even for the short second it poised there the poor dead clay managed to stop another of those bullets which flew up in such deadly silence from that distant sandbank.
"Good-by," said Kettle, as he toppled the corpse over, and it fell with a splash, stiff-limbed into the yellow water. He watched the body as it bobbed up again to the surface, and floated with the stream out into the silvery sunshine. "Good-by, cocky," said he. "You've been a good nigger, and, as you were shot doing your duty, they'll set you on at the place where you've gone to, one of the lightest jobs they've got suitable for a black pagan. That's a theological fact. You'll probable turn to and stoke; I'll be sending you down presently another batch of heathen to shovel on the fire. I've got a biggish bill against those beggars on that sandbank yonder for the mischief they've done."
But it was no place there to waste much time on sentiment. The woodwork of the shabby little steamer was riddled with splintered holes; the rusted iron plating was starred with gray lead-splashes; and every minute more bullets ploughed furrows in the yellow waters of the river, or whisped through the air overhead, or hit the vessel herself with peremptory knocks. It is all very well to affect a contempt for a straggling ill-aimed fire such as this; but, given a long enough exposure to it, one is bound to be hit; and so, if the work was to be attempted, the quicker it was set about the more chance there was of getting it finished.
They use wood fuel on these small, ungainly steamers which do their business up in the savage heart of Africa on the waters of the Haut Congo, and because every man with a gun for many reasons feels himself to be an enemy of the Free State, the steamers carry their firing logs stacked in ramparts round their boilers and other vital parts. But wood, as compared with coal, is bulky stuff to carry, and as the stowage capacity of these stern-wheelers is small, they have to make frequent calls to rebunker.
Indeed, it was for this purpose that Kettle had originally put in at the village where Commandant Balliot had his headquarters; and, as other events happened there which he had not calculated upon, he had steamed out into the broad river again without a chance of taking any logs on board, and, in fact, with his stock of fuel down very near to the vanishing-point.
On this account, therefore, after the fatal shot into the boiler, and the subsequent disablement and drifting on to the sandbank, all repairing work had to be done under full exposure to the fire of the mutineers. The Central African negro is a fairly stolid person, and as the sight of a little slaughter does not in the least upset his nerves, he can stand bullet hail for a good long time without emotion, especially if there is no noise and bustle attached to it. But once let a scare get rubbed home into his stupid brain, and let him get started off on the run, and he is an awkward person to stop.
But Kettle did not start to hustle his black laborers back to work at once. He knew that there would be heavy mortality amongst them once they were exposed to fire, and he wanted to lose as few of them as possible. He had got use for them afterward. So for long enough he worked alone, and the bullets spattered around him gayly. He hammered out a lead templet to cover the wound in the boiler, which, of course, as bad luck would have it, was situated at a place where three plates met; and then whilst Balliot's armorer with fire and hammer beat out a plate of iron the exact counterpart of this, he rigged a ratchet drill and bored holes through the boiler's skin to carry the necessary bolts.
Clay volunteered assistance once, but as he was told he would be asked for help when it was needed, he squatted down under the sheltered side of the boiler again, and smoked, and played more music-hall ditties on the banjo. Commandant Balliot held to a sullen silence. He was growing to have a poisonous hatred for this contemptuous little Englishman who by sheer superiority had made him give up his treasured dictatorship, and he formed schemes for the Englishman's discomfiture in the near future.
But for the present he hoped very much that the man would not be killed; he recognized, with fresh spasms of anger every time he thought about it, that without Captain Kettle there would be no future--at any rate on this earth--for any of them.
And meanwhile Captain Owen Kettle, stripped to shoes and trousers, sweated over his work in the baking heat. Twice had a bullet grazed him, once on the neck, and once on the round of a shoulder, and red stains grew over the white satin of his skin. The work was strange to him certainly, but he set about it with more than an amateur's skill. All sailors have been handy with their fingers from time immemorial, but the modern steamer-sailor, during his apprenticeship as mate, has to turn his hand to a vast variety of trades. He is painter, carpenter, stevedore, crew-driver, all in one day; and on the next he is doctor, navigator, clerk, tailor, and engineer. And especially he is engineer. He must be able to drive winch, windlass, or crane, like an artist; he must have a good aptitude for using hand tools; and if he can work machine tools also, it is so much the better for him.
Yes, Captain Kettle put the patch on that boiler like a workman. He fitted his bolts, and made his joints; then luted the manhole and bolted that back in place; and then stepped down while a couple of negroes sluiced him with water from gourds, and rubbed him clean and dry with handfuls of wild cotton waste. So far, although the incessant hail of bullets had pitted the boiler's skin in a hundred places, no second shot had found a spot sufficiently soft to make a puncture. The range of the bombardment was long, perhaps, and though a bullet at seven hundred yards may, with convenience, kill a man, it will not pierce seven-eighths boiler plate. And so, theoretically, the boiler was safe for the time being.
But practically it was otherwise. The boiler was by no means new. It was corroded with years, and incapacity, and neglect, as is the custom with all parts of boats and machinery on the Haut Congo. But it had been brought up to that waterway by carriers at vast expense from Matadi, the highest steamer port on the Lower Congo, probably costing three months and a dozen lives in transit, so that it was debited in the books of the Free State as being worth its weight in silver, and destined to be used on without replacement till it saw fit to burst.
So Kettle knew that in places it would be not much thicker than stout brown paper, and was quite aware that if any of the pattering bullets investigated one of these patches, he would have to do his work over again. He had a strong--and, I think, natural--disinclination for this. He had come through terrific risks during the last four hours, and could not expect to do so a second time with equal immunity; his two wounds smarted; and (although it sounds ludicrous that such a thing should have weight) the dirt inseparable from such employment jarred against his neat and cleanly habits, and filled him with unutterable disgust.
The moment, he conceived, was one for hurry. He told off four of the negroes as trimmers and stokers, and set Commandant Balliot over them to see that they pressed on with their work; he sent Clay with a huge gang of helpers overboard on the lee side to risk the crocodiles, and dig away the sand; and he himself, with a dozen paddlers, got into the dug-out canoe, which was his only boat, and set to carrying out a kedge and line astern. All of these occupations took time, and when at last steam had mounted to a working pressure in the battered gauge, and they got on board again, two of his canoe-men had been shot, and one of Clay's party had been dragged away into deep water by a prowling crocodile.
As no one else was competent, Kettle himself took charge of the engines, and roared his commands with one hand on the throttle, and the other on the reversing gear; Clay, for the moment, was quartermaster, and stood to the wheel on the upper deck; and Balliot, under the tuition of curses and revilings, drove the winch, which heaved and slacked on the line made fast to the kedge.
The little steamer rolled and squeaked and coughed, and the paddle-wheel at her stern kicked up a compost of sand and mud and yellow water that almost choked them with its crushed marigold scent. The helm swung over alternately from hard-a-starboard to hard-a-port; the stern-wheel ground savagely into the sand, first one way and then the other; and the gutter, which she had delved for herself in the bank, grew gradually wider and more deep. Then slowly she began to make real progress astern.
"Now, heave on that kedge," Kettle yelled, and the winch bucked and clattered under a greater head of steam, and the warp sung to the strain; and presently the little vessel slid off the bank, picked up her anchor, and was free to go where she pleased.
"Hurrah," cried Balliot, "we are saved. You are a brave man, Captain."
"I didn't ask you to speak," retorted Kettle. "We aren't out of the wood by a long chalk yet."
"But we are out of their fire now. We shall be disturbed no further."
"No, my lad, but we've got a precious heap of disturbing to do on our own account before we've squared up for this tea party. I'm going to drop down stream to somewhere quiet where we can fill up with wood, and then I'm coming back again to give your late Tommies bad fits."
"But I don't authorize this. I didn't foresee--"
"Very likely not. But a fat lot I care for that. Fact remains that I'm skipper here, and I'm going to do as I think best. I've got it in mind that my two engineers and a lot of good niggers have been shot by those disgusting savages over yonder, and I don't permit that sort of thing without making somebody pay a pretty steep bill for the amusement. So I'm going down stream to wood up, and then we'll come back and make them pay for the tea party."
"You are exceeding your powers. I warn you."
"If any of my inferiors on board ship don't keep their heads shut when they aren't spoken to," said Kettle unpleasantly, "I always disarrange their front teeth. If I have any more palaver from you, you'll get to know what it feels like." He shouted up the companion way--"On top there, quartermaster?"
"Hullo?" said Clay.
"Keep her down river to M'barri-m'barri. That's a twelve-mile run from here. There are two big cotton woods in a line which will bring you to the landing. You know the channel?"
"I ought to. I've been up and down it times enough. But I guess I don't--at least, not now."
"Fuddled again, are you? Then I'll con you from here. You see three trees growing on that island bang ahead? Keep her on those." He turned to a couple of stalwart niggers at his side--"Say, you boys, you lib for top, one-time. You take dem Doctor's gin-bottle, and you throw him overboard, one-time. If dem Doctor he make palaver, you throw him overboard too. Away with you now. By James! we got to get discipline in this ship somehow, and I'm a man that can teach it. Here, you black swine at that furnace, go slow with those logs, or we won't be able to steam her half-way."
He bustled about the little vessel, turning every soul on board to some employment or other; and those of the newcomers who did not know his wishes, and were not quick enough for his taste, received instruction in a manner which is understood by men all the world over, be their skins black, or white, or yellow.
The process might not be very pleasant for those who came in contact with it, but it was very effective for the purpose aimed at. In sea parlance Kettle had to "break up" some half-dozen of them before all hands acquiesced to his dictatorship; but they were quick to see there was a Man over them this time, and involuntarily they admired his virility even while they rubbed ruefully at their bumps; and during the times of stress that came afterward, none of these Africans were so smart to obey as those on whom their taskmaster's hand had originally come heaviest.
The period of instruction was short. It began when the little stern-wheeler slipped off the bank and got under weigh. It was completed satisfactorily during the twelve miles run down the river. The boat was steered into M'barri-m'barri creek, made hastily fast to trees on the bank, and exuded her people in an armed rush. They had possession of the place almost before the villagers knew of their arrival, and proceeded to the object of their call. There was no especial show of violence.
The women and the children were imprisoned in the huts; the men were given axes, and sent off into the forest to cut and gather fuel; and, meanwhile, the landing party set themselves to eat what they fancied and to carry off any store of ivory and rubber that they might chance upon. There was nothing remarkable in the manoeuvre. It is the authorized course of proceedings when a Free State launch goes into the bank for wood and supplies.
The villagers brought down the logs smartly enough, and waxed quite friendly on finding that none of the hostage women and children had been killed or maltreated during their absence. They duly gave up the German axes which had been loaned to them, and carried the wood aboard. Kettle arranged its disposition. He had solid defences built up all round the vulnerable boiler and engines. He had a stout breastwork built all round inside the rail of the lower deck, quite stout enough to absorb a bullet even if fired at point-blank range. And he had another breastwork built on the third deck, above the cabins, so that he turned the flimsy little steamer into a very staunch, if somewhat ungainly, floating fort.
He got on board the rubber and ivory he had collected, and had it struck down below--the dividends of the State have to be remembered first, even at moments of trouble like these--and then he gave orders, and the vessel set off again up stream. On the lower deck he stayed himself during the journey back, and gave instructions to Commander Balliot in the art of engine-driving.
Balliot was sullen at first, and showed little inclination to acquire so warm and grimy a craft, and fenced himself behind his dignity. But Kettle put forth his persuasive powers; he did not hit the man, he merely talked; and under the merciless lash of that vinegary little tongue, Balliot repented him of his stubbornness, and set himself to acquire the elementary knack of engine nursing and feeding and driving.
"And now," said Kettle, cheerfully, when the pupil had mastered the vague outlines of his business, "you see what can be done by kindness. I haven't hit you once, and you know enough already not to blow her up if only you're careful. Don't you even sham stupid again; and, see here, don't you grit your teeth at me when you think I'm not looking, or I'll beat you into butcher's meat when I've hammered these rebels, and have a bit of spare time. You want to learn a lot of manners yet, Mr. Commandant Balliot, and where I come from we teach these to foreigners free of charge. Just you remember that I'm your better, my man, and give me proper respect, or I'll lead you a life a nigger's yellow dog wouldn't fancy."
Now the revolted troops, when they saw the launch wriggle off the bank where she was stuck, and steam away down stream, were filled with exasperation, because they had confidently anticipated making a barbecue out of Commandant Balliot in return for many cruelties received, and doing the same by any other Europeans whom they might catch on the steamer, because, being white, they would be presumably relatives of Balliot. It never occurred to their simple minds that the launch would return, much less that she would offer them battle; so when indeed she did appear again, they were in the midst of a big consultation about their future movements.
However, the African who owns a gun, be he revolted soldier or mere peaceful farmer, never lets that weapon go far away from his hand, for fear that his neighbor should send him away into the land of shadows in order to possess it. And so a fusillade was soon commenced. But the launch, armed with her fine rampart of logs, bore it unflinchingly, and steamed up within a hundred yards of the thick of them, and just held there in her place, with her wheel gently flapping against the stream, and opened a vicious fire from fifty muzzles.
Of modern rifles Kettle had only twenty on board, but he had an abundance of those beautiful instruments known as "trade guns," and at shot-range a man can be killed just as definitely by a dose of pot-leg out of a gas-pipe barrel as he can by a dum-dum bullet sent through scientific rifling. Indeed, for close-quarter righting pot-leg is far more comprehensive, and far less likely to miss than the lonely modern bullet. Moroever, his crew had quite as much dread for him as they had for the enemy, and as a consequence they fought with a briskness which made even their grim little chief approve.
The crowd of mutineers did not, however, offer themselves to be browned like a pack of helpless sheep for long. They were Africans who had been born in an atmosphere of scuffle and skirmish, and death had no especial terrors for them. Moreover, they had learnt certain elements of the modern art of war from white officers; and now, in the moment of trial, their dull brains worked, and the crafty knowledge came back to them. They were a thousand strong; they had friends all round--cannibal friends--who would come to help in the fight and share in the loot; and, moreover, they had canoes. Other well-manned canoes also were fast coming to their help down stream.
In the canoes then they put off, and Kettle smiled grimly as he saw the move. He had thought of this before, but it was greater luck than he had dared hope for. But now the enemy had given himself over into his hand. The one strong position of the stern-wheel launch was her forward part. The Congo is full of snags and floating logs which cannot always be avoided, and so all steamers are strengthened to stand contact with them; and he could give them the stem now without risk to himself.
He pretended flight when the canoes first came out, standing across toward the further bank of the river, which was some dozen miles away. The rebels fell into the lure, and paddled frantically after him. Canoe after canoe put out, as fast as they could be manned. The white men on the steamer were running away; they were frightened; there was spoil and revenge to be got for the taking. And from unseen villages on the islands and on the bank other canoes shot out to get their share.