"Guess it's your palaver. I've told you what the risks are."

"And I'm going to take them," said Kettle grimly. "You may watch me handle the risks now with your own eyes, if you wish."

He went down off the bridge, walked along the clean decks, and came to where a poor wretch lay in the last stage of small-pox collapse. He examined the man carefully. "My friend," he said at last, "you've not got long for this world, anyway, and I want to borrow your last moments. I suppose you won't like to shift, but it's in a good cause, and anyway you can't object."

He stooped and lifted the loathsome bundle in his arms, and then, in spite of a cry of expostulation from Nilssen, walked off with his burden to Rabeira's room.

The Portuguese captain was in his bunk, trying to sleep. He was sober for the first time for many days, and, in consequence, feeling not a little ill.

Kettle deposited his charge with carefulness on the littered settee, and Rabeira started up with a wild scream of fright and a babble of oaths. Kettle shut and locked the door.

"Now look here," he said, "you've earned more than you'll ever get paid in this life, and there's a tolerably heavy bill against you for the next. It looks to me as if it would be a good thing if you went off there to settle up the account right now. But I'm not going to take upon myself to be your hangman. I'm just going to give you a chance of pegging out, and I sincerely hope you'll take it. I've brought our friend here to be your room mate for the evening. It's just about nightfall now, and you've got to stay with him till daybreak."

"You coward!" hissed the man. "You coward! You coward!" he screamed.

"Think so?" said Kettle gravely. "Then if that's your idea, I'll stay here in the room, too, and take my risks. God's seen the game, and I'll guess He'll hand over the beans fairly."

Perspiration stood in beads on all their faces. The room, the one unclean room of the ship, was full of breathless heat, and stale with the lees of drink. Kettle, in his spruce-white drill clothes, stood out against the squalor and the disorder, as a mirror might upon a coal-heap.

The Portuguese captain, with nerves smashed by his spell of debauch, played a score of parts. First he was aggressive, asserting his rights as a man and the ship's master, and demanding the key of the door. Then he was warlike, till his frenzied attack earned him such a hiding that he was glad enough to crawl back on to the mattress of his bunk. Then he was beseeching. And then he began to be troubled with zoological hauntings, which occupied him till the baking air cooled with the approach of the dawn.

The smitten negro on the settee gave now and then a moan, but for the most part did his dying with quietness. Had Kettle deliberately worked for that purpose, he could not have done anything more calculated to make the poor wretch's last moments happy.

"Oh, Massa!" he kept on whispering, "too-much-fine room. You plenty-much good for let me lib for die heah." And then he would relapse into barbaric chatterings more native to his taste, and fitting to his condition.

Captain Kettle played his parts as nurse and warder with grave attention. He sat perspiring in his shirt sleeves, writing at the table whenever for a moment or two he had a spell of rest; and his screed grew rapidly. He was making verse, and it was under the stress of severe circumstances like these that his Muse served him best.

The fetid air of the room throbbed with heat; the glow from the candle lamp was a mere yellow flicker; and the Portuguese, who cowered with twitching fingers in the bunk, was quite ready to murder him at the slightest opening: it was not a combination of circumstances which would have inspired many men.

Morning came, with a shiver and a chill, and with the first flicker of dawn, the last spark of the negro's life went out. Kettle nodded to the ghastly face as though it had been an old friend. "You seemed to like being made use of," he said. "Well, daddy, I hope you have served your turn. If your skipper hasn't got the plague in his system now, I shall think God's forgotten this bit of Africa entirely."

He stood up, gathered his papers, slung the spruce white drill coat over his arm, and unlocked the door. "Captain Rabeira," he said, "you have my full permission to resume your occupation of going to the deuce your own way." With which parting salutation, he went below to the steamer's bathroom and took his morning tub.

Half an hour passed before he came to the deck again, and Nilssen met him at the head of the companion-way with a queer look on his face. "Well," he said, "you've done it."

"Done what?"

"Scared Rabeira over the side."

"How?"

"He came scampering on deck just now, yelling blue murder, and trying to catch crawly things that weren't there. Guess he'd got jim-jams bad. Then he took it into his head that a swim would be useful, and before any one could stop him, he was over the side."

"Well?"

"He's over the side still," said the Dane drily. "He didn't come to the surface. Guess a crocodile chopped him."

"There are plenty round."

"Naturally. We've been ground baiting pretty liberally these last few weeks. Well, I guess we are about through with the business now. Not nervous about yourself, eh?"

"No," said Kettle, and touched his cap. "God's been looking on at this gamble, as I told Rabeira last night, and He dealt over the beans the way they were earned."

"That's all right," said Nilssen cheerfully. "When a man keeps his courage he don't get small-pox, you bet."

"Well," said Kettle, "I suppose we'll be fumigated and get a clean bill in about ten days from now, and I'm sure I don't mind the bit of extra rest. I've got a lot of stuff I want to write up. It's come in my head lately, and I've had no time to get it down on paper. I shouldn't wonder but what it makes a real stir some day when it's printed; it's real good stuff. I wonder if that yellow-faced Belgian doctor will live to give us pratique?"

"I never saw a man with such a liver on him."

"D'you know," said Kettle, "I'd like that doctor to hang on just for another ten days and sign our bill. He's a surly brute, but I've got to have quite a liking for him. He seems to have grown to be part of the show, just like the crows, and the sun, and the marigold smell, and the crocodiles."

"Oh," said Nilssen, "you're a blooming poet. Come, have a cocktail before we chop."

CHAPTER II

THE LITTLE WOODEN GOD WITH THE EYES.

The colored Mrs. Nilssen, of Banana, gave the pink gin cocktails a final brisk up with the swizzle-stick, poured them out with accurate division, and handed the tray to Captain Kettle and her husband. The men drank off the appetizer and put down the glasses. Kettle nodded a word of praise for the mixture and thanks to its concoctor, and Mrs. Nilssen gave a flash of white teeth, and then shuffled away off the veranda, and vanished within the bamboo walls of the pilotage.

Nilssen sank back into his long-sleeved Madeira chair, a perfect wreck of a man, and Kettle sat up and looked at him with a serious face. "Look here," he said, "you should go home, or at any rate run North for a spell in Grand Canary. If you fool with this health-palaver any longer, you'll peg out."

The Dane stared wistfully out across the blue South Atlantic waters, which twinkled beyond the littered garden and the sand beach. "Yes," he said, "I'd like well enough to go back to my old woman in Boston again, and eat pork and beans, and hear her talk of culture, and the use of missionaries, and all that good old homey rot; but I guess I can't do that yet. I've got to shake this sickness off me right here, first."

"And I tell you you'll never be a sound man again so long as you lib for Congo. Take a trip home, Captain, and let the salt air blow the