able had to be.

But the struggle was no quick thing of a day, or even of a week. The man
lingered wirily on, and in the mean while Kettle saw the marvellous
political structure, which with so much labor and daring he had built
up, crumbling to pieces, as it were, before his very eyes. A company of
Arab slave-traders had entered the district, and were recapturing his
subject villages one by one.

At the first attack runners came to him imploring help. It was useless
to send his half-baked soldiers without going himself. They knew no
other leader; there was not a negro among them fit to take a command;
and he himself was tied. He said nothing to Clay, but just sent a
refusal, and remained at his post.

Again and again came clamorous appeals for help against these new
invaders, and again and again he had to give the same stubborn refusal.
His vaunted New Republic was being split up again into its primitive
elements; the creed of the South Shields chapel was being submerged
under a wave of red-hot Mohammedanism; and the ivory, that hard-earned
ivory, with all its delicious potentialities, was once more being lifted
by alien raiders, and this time forever beyond his reach.

Clay got some inkling of what was going on, and repeatedly urged him to
be off at once and put things straight in person. "Don't you worry about
me, Skipper," he'd say. "I'll get along here fine by myself. Nobody'll
come to worry me. And if they did, they'd let me alone. I'm far too
unwholesome-looking to chop just now."

But Kettle always stolidly refused to leave him. Indeed, with difficulty
(for he was at all times a painfully truthful man) he used to lie to his
patient and say that there was no need for him to go at all; that
everything was going on quite as they could wish; and that he was vastly
enjoying the relaxation of a holiday.

But in sober fact things were going very much awry. And every day they
got worse. Even his original bevy of troops, those he had brought up
with him into the country on the stern-wheel launch, seemed to grasp
the fact that his star was in the descendant. There was no open mutiny,
for they still feared him too much personally to dare that; but in the
black unwatched nights they stole away from the village, and every day
their numbers thinned, and the villagers followed their lead; and when
the end came, the two lonely white men had the village to themselves.

Clay's last words were typical of him. Kettle, with de