cely fixed up now. I
wish I could make provision like that for my old women."

CHAPTER III.

A QUICK WAY WITH REBELS.

Another bullet came silently up out of the distance, and the nigger
second engineer of the launch gave a queer little whimper and fell down
_flop_, and lay with his flat nose nuzzling the still warm boiler. A
hole, which showed up red and angry against the black wool just
underneath his grass cap, made the diagnosis of his injury an
easy matter.

The noise of the shot came to them quite a long time afterward, when the
little puff of smoke which had spirted up from the distant sandbank had
already begun to thin under the sunshine; but it was that gun-crack, and
not the sight of the dead engineer, which gave the working negroes their
final scare. With loud children's cries, and queer dodgings of fear,
they pitched down their working tools, and fled to where the other black
soldiers and passengers were lying on the iron floor-plates of the
launch, in security below her water-line.

The Belgian Commandant, from his shelter at the other side of the
boiler, swore volubly, and Clay, the English doctor, laughed and twanged
out a music-hall tune on his banjo. Kettle, intent on getting his vessel
once more under command, was for driving the negro crew back to their
work by the simple methods peculiar to the British merchant officer. But
this Commandant Balliot forbade, and, as he was Kettle's superior in
the Congo Free State service, that small mariner had (very much against
his grain) to obey.

"We shall have these fellows rebelling next," said the Commandant, "if
you push them too hard; and if they join the rest, where shall we be?"

"There are a thousand of your troops in the mutiny already, according to
your tally," said Kettle stiffly, "and I don't see that if this hundred
joined them it would make much difference to us, one way or the other.
Besides," he added, almost persuasively, "if I had the handling of them
they would not join the others. They would stay here and do as they
were told."

"Captain Kettle," snapped the Commandant, "you have heard my orders. If
I have any more of this hectoring spirit from you, I shall report your
conduct when we get back to Stanley Pool."

"You may report till you're black in the face," said Kettle truculently;
"but if you don't put a bit more backbone into things, you'll do it as a
ghost and not as a live man. Look at your record up to date. You come u