competent, and he knew it, but Kettle had been tactless enough
to tell him so; and, moreover, Kettle had thrown out the national gibe
about Waterloo, which no Belgian can ever forgive. Commandant Balliot
gritted his teeth, and rubbed at his scrubby beard, and melodramatically
vowed revenge.

He said nothing about it then; he even sat at meat with the two
Englishmen, and shared the ship duties with them without so much as a
murmur. He could not but notice, too, that Kettle said nothing more now
about being supreme chief, and had, in fact, tacitly dropped back to his
old position as skipper of the launch. But Balliot brooded over the
injuries he had received at the hands of this truculent little sailor,
and they grew none the smaller from being held in memory.

Kettle's own method of reporting his doings, too, was not calculated to
endear him to the authorities. He steamed down to headquarters at
Leopoldville, went ashore, and swung into the Commandant's house with
easy contempt and assurance. He gave an arid account of the launch's
voyage up the great river to the centre of Africa and back, and then in
ten words described Balliot's disaster, his rescue, and its cost. "And
so," he wound up, "as the contract was outside Mr. Balliot's size, I
took it in my own hands and carried it through. I've brought back your
blooming army down here. It's quite tame now."

The Commandant at Leopoldville nodded stiffly, and said he would confer
with Captain Kettle's senior officer, Commandant Balliot, after which
Kettle would probably hear something further.

"All right," said the little man. "I should tell you, too, that Mr.
Balliot's not without his uses. With a bit of teaching I got him to
handle my engines quite decent for an amateur." He turned to go, but
stopped again in the glare of the doorway. "Oh, there's one other thing.
I want to recommend to you Doctor Clay. He's a good man, Clay. He stood
by me well in the trouble we had, after he got roused up. I'd like to
recommend him for promotion."

"I will see if Commandant Balliot--as senior officer--adds his
recommendation to yours," said the other drily. "Good-morning to you for
the present."

Captain Kettle went down to the beach, and stepped along the gangway on
to the stern-wheel launch. The working negroes on the lower deck stopped
their chatter for the moment as he passed, and looked up at him with a
queer mixture of awe and admiration. From above came the tinkle of a
ba