this tribe
once welcomed an English traveller by spitting into each of his hands,
and then into his face. The traveller, in a rage, spat back as hard as
ever he could, and the chief was overcome with joy at the traveller's
friendliness.

Near Gondokoro, at St. Croix, Gordon came to the ruins of an Austrian
missionary settlement. Only a few banana trees, planted by the
missionaries, and some graves, marked where the Christian settlement
had been. Out of twenty missionaries who had gone there during
thirteen years, thirteen had died of fever, two of dysentery, and two,
broken in health, had had to go home. And yet they had not been able
to claim as a Christian even one of the blacks amongst whom they
worked. No wonder that the Austrian Government lost heart and gave up
the mission.

When Gordon reached Gondokoro he saw that it was absurd to pretend that
the Khedive ruled any of the country outside its walls. No one dared
go half a mile outside without being in danger of his life from the
tribes whose wives and children and cattle the slavers had taken.

Gordon felt that to make friends with those people, to show them that
he was sorry for them, and that he wished to help them, was the first
thing to be done if he was to be in reality their Governor. And so, as
he travelled on from point to point--back to Khartoum from Gondokoro,
to Berber, to Fashoda, to Soubat--he made friends wherever he went.
Quickly the black people came to love the man who punished or slew
their enemies, who took them from the slavers, and gave them back their
wives and children and cattle. He gave grain to some, set others to
plant maize, fed the starving ones, and always paid them for each piece
of work that they did for him.

Sometimes, even, he would buy from them the children that they were too
poor to feed, and find good homes for them.

One man sold him his two boys of twelve and eight for a basket of
dhoora (a kind of grain). He soon found that the blacks did not look
on the sale of human beings in the same way that he did.

[Illustration: In the Soudan buying two children for a basketful of
dhoora]

One man stole a cow, and when the owner found out the thief and came to
claim his cow, it was too late. The cow had been eaten.

Next day Gordon passed the man's hut, and saw that one of his two
children was gone.

"Where was the other?" he asked of the mother.

"Oh, it had been given to the man from whom the cow had been