A Master of Fortune Part 3

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. G.o.d'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 s.h.i.+p, 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, a.s.serting his rights as a man and the s.h.i.+p'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, Ma.s.sa!" 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances which would have inspired many men.

Morning came, with a s.h.i.+ver 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 G.o.d'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 pa.s.sed 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. "G.o.d'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 c.o.c.ktail before we chop."

CHAPTER II.

THE LITTLE WOODEN G.o.d WITH THE EYES.

The colored Mrs. Nilssen, of Banana, gave the pink gin c.o.c.ktails 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 gla.s.ses. 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 diseases out of you."

"If I go to sea," said the pilot wearily, "I shall be st.i.tched up within the week, and dropped over to make a hole in the water. I don't know whether I'm going to get well anywhere, but if I do, it's right here.

Now just hear me. You're the only living soul in this blasted Congo Free State that I can trust worth a cent, and I believe you've got grit enough to get me cured if only you'll take the trouble to do it. I'm too weak to take on the job myself; and, even if I was sound, I reckon it would be beyond my weight. I tell you it's a mighty big contract. But then, as I've seen for myself, you're a man that likes a scuffle."

"You're speaking above my head. Pull yourself together, Captain, and then, perhaps, I'll understand what you want."

Nilssen drew the quinine bottle toward him, tapped out a little hill of feathery white powder into a cigarette paper, rolled it up, and swallowed the dose. "I'm not raving," he said, "or anywhere near it; but if you want the cold-drawn truth, listen here: I'm poisoned. I've got fever on me, too, I'll grant, but that's nothing more than a fellow has every week or so in the ordinary way of business. I guess with quinine, whiskey, and pills, I can smile at any fever in Africa, and have done this last eight years. But it's this poison that gets me."

"Bosh," said Kettle. "If it was me that talked about getting poisoned, there'd be some sense in it. I know I'm not popular here. But you're a man that's liked. You hit it off with these Belgian brutes, and you make the n.i.g.g.e.rs laugh. Who wants to poison you?"

"All right," said Nilssen; "you've been piloting on the Congo some six months now, and so of course you know all about it. But let me know a bit better. I've watched the tricks of the n.i.g.g.e.rs here-away for a good many years now, and I've got a big respect for their powers when they mean mischief."

"Have you been getting their backs up, then?"

"Yes. You've seen that big ju-ju in my room?"

"That foul-looking wooden G.o.d with the looking-gla.s.s eyes?"

"Just that. I don't know where the preciousness comes in, but it's a thing of great value."

"How did you get hold of it?"

"Well, I suppose if you want to be told flatly, I scoffed it. You see, it was in charge of a pa.s.senger boy, who brought it aboard the _M'poso_ at Matadi. He landed across by canoe from Vivi, and wanted steamer pa.s.sage down to Boma by the _M'poso_. I was piloting her, and I got my eye on that ju-ju[1] from the very first. Captain Image and that thief of a purser Balgarnie were after it, too, but as it was a bit of a race between us as to who should get it first, one couldn't wait to be too particular."

[Footnote 1: A ju-ju in West African parlance may be a large carved idol, or merely a piece of rag, or skin, or anything else that the native is pleased to set up as a charm. Ju-ju also means witchcraft. If you poison a man, you put ju-ju on him. If you see anything you do not understand, you promptly set it down as ju-ju. Similarly chop is food, and also the act of feeding. "One-time" is immediately.]