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 dr