s tinned sausages, or,
possibly, to kill him. It was then he began to dislike them. In reality,
they were discussing the watch strapped to his wrist. They believed it
was a powerful juju, to ward off evil spirits. They were afraid of it.

One day, to pay the chief wood-boy for a carved paddle, Everett was
measuring a _bras_ of cloth. As he had been taught, he held the cloth in
his teeth and stretched it to the ends of his finger-tips. The wood-boy
thought the white man was giving him short measure. White men always
_had_ given him short measure, and, at a glance, he could not recognize
that this one was an Everett of Boston.

So he opened Everett's fingers.

All the blood in Everett's body leaped to his head. That he, a white
man, an Everett, who had come so far to set these people free, should
be accused by one of them of petty theft!

He caught up a log of fire wood and laid open the scalp of the black
boy, from the eye to the crown of his head. The boy dropped, and
Everett, seeing the blood creeping through his kinky wool, turned ill
with nausea. Drunkenly, through a red cloud of mist, he heard himself
shouting, "The _black_ nigger! The _black nigger!_ He touched me! I
_tell_ you, he touched me!" Captain Nansen led Everett to his cot and
gave him fizzy salts, but it was not until sundown that the trembling
and nausea ceased.

Then, partly in shame, partly as a bribe, he sought out the injured boy
and gave him the entire roll of cloth. It had cost Everett ten francs.
To the wood-boy it meant a year's wages. The boy hugged it in his arms,
as he might a baby, and crooned over it. From under the blood-stained
bandage, humbly, without resentment, he lifted his tired eyes to those
of the white man. Still, dumbly, they begged the answer to the same
question.

During the five months Everett spent up the river he stopped at many
missions, stations, one-man wood posts. He talked to Jesuit fathers, to
_inspecteurs_, to collectors for the State of rubber, taxes, elephant
tusks, in time, even in Bangalese, to chiefs of the native villages.
According to the point of view, he was told tales of oppression, of
avarice, of hideous crimes, of cruelties committed in the name of trade
that were abnormal, unthinkable. The note never was of hope, never of
cheer, never inspiring. There was always the grievance, the spirit of
unrest, of rebellion that ranged from dislike to a primitive, hot hate.
Of his own land and life he heard noth