eze would keep it cool.

"Now for Gesang!" shouted Schubert, knocking the neck off a bottle of
beer, and beginning to sing like a drunken pirate.

A man whom he introduced as "a genuine Jew from Jerusalem" came out
from a gloomy recess filled with tusks and sacks of dried red pepper,
and watched everything from now on with an eye like a gimlet, writing
down in a book against each sergeant's name whatever he took to drink.
They appeared to have no check on him. Nobody signed anything. Nobody
as much as glanced at his account.

"What is the use?" said Schubert, noticing my glance and interpreting
the unspoken question. "There is just so much drink in the whole
place. We shall drink every drop of it! All that matters is, who is
to pay for the champagne? That stuff is costly."

They all took beer to begin with, knocking the necks from the bottles
as if that act alone lent the necessary air of deviltry to the whole
proceedings. A small, very black Nyamwesi came with brush and pan and
groped on the floor all night for the splinters of glass, sleeping
between times in a corner until a fresh volley of breaking bottle necks
awoke him to work again.

"Die Wacht am Rhein!" yelled Schubert. "Start it up! Sing that
first!" He began to sing it himself, all out of tune.

Fred cut the noise short by standing up to play something nobody could
sing to a jangling clamor of chords and runs on which he prides
himself, that he swears is classical, but of which neither he nor
anybody knows the name. Then he drank some beer and sang a comic song
or two in English, we joining in the choruses.

Meanwhile, Brown was soaking away steadily, taking whatever drink came
first to hand, and having no interest whatever in anything but the task
of assuaging the thirst he had accumulated in the course of all that
long marching since he left home. He had forgotten his cattle
already--the Greeks who stole them--the Masai who stole from the
Greeks. He paid for all he took, to the Jew's extreme surprise and
satisfaction, and grumbled at the price of everything, to the Jew's
supremest unconcern.

"An' my name's Brown o' Lumbwa, just in proof of all I say!" he
informed the room at large at intervals.

When Will had exhausted all the American songs he knew, and Fred had
run through his own long list there was nothing left for it but to make
up accompaniments to the songs the sergeants had been raised on. Fred
made the happy discovery that