ord. 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.