CHAPTER XII

EXHIBITS ANTISEPTICS

The night was hot, and steamy, and still. Even the insect hum was pitched on a drowsy note. The darkness seemed almost fat in its greasy heaviness. Two of the sweating factory boys were playing tom-tom on upturned kerosene cans, and a third was throwing in an erratic obligato with two pieces of scrap iron for an instrument. And from the river behind a pair of crocodiles made unpleasant noises with irritating persistency. Carter thought, too, that above the decay smell of the factory rubber store, the stable smell of the Krooboys, the crushed-marigold smell of the river, he could also catch the musky odor of the crocodiles, and felt vaguely sickened thereby.

"... Those last-a bags of kernels I have not got-a weighed, senhor. I was weary, and so I go-a to change and shave for dinner."

"Why don't you shave in the morning, instead of carrying a chin like a besom all through the day? I suppose, as usual, you were going to weigh up those kernels to-morrow?"

"You are most indulgent, senhor."

"I am nothing of the kind. Sufficient for the day is the work thereof, and the man that puts it off till to-morrow gets out of here. Like to hand in your resignation?"

"No, senhor, no."

"Then go and weigh those kernels, one-time. Then come back here and make up your books. D'ye think I'm going to have my whole machinery of commerce held up because you want to go and shave, and oil your head, and put on clean whites and a crimson belly-band and otherwise make yourself fetching for the benefit of Miss O'Neill?"

"Miss-a O'Neill?" said the Portuguese in surprise. "I do not care a banana-skin----"

"Here, don't try and fill me up," said Carter bluntly. "And don't put on time. Take a lamp and go out and weigh those kernels, and see you don't set the shed on fire, and when you're through, and have posted your books, come out and fetch me. I'm going to smoke a cigar out in the open."

"The dew-a is heavy. There is fever about."

"Take your advice to the devil."

"Which fever," said Cascaes, "I should have added, if you had-a not interrupted me--which fever I hope you will get."

"That's all right. I like you dagos better when you spit venom openly. Now, you hurry up and go through those kernels, and see you get the weights right."

The dew was thick on the grass in the clearing and stood in sleek greasy drops on all the patches of bare stamped earth. Moon and stars were all eclipsed. Even the fireflies, although the dark would have given full value to their manoeuvres, were absent. The unhealthy phosphorence of rotting dead wood here and there was the only illumination, except here and there a glow from a window in the factory.

Carter went out through a gate of the fort and walked up and down with restless energy. He was wet to the knees with dew; the damp Canary cigar between his teeth had long since gone out; but he cared for no small things like these. He kept repeating to himself that "a man must play the game." "A man must play the game."

And presently, when the tom-toms and the jangling iron suggested some tune to his ear, he changed this to a jangle which stated "I could--not love--thee dear--so much--loved I--not hon--or more." And as the tune beat out into the hot steamy night, so did the words keep time to them with irritating repetition.

Once he stopped and shook a fist at the invisible sky above. "I am going to marry Laura," he declared, "if she was ten times as black. I am going to marry her though I know my father will never speak to me again, and I can't take her home. I am going to marry her though the heaven's fall. I am going to marry her for one reason that can't be got over, and that is because I said I would. A man must play the game. But my God! why did I never guess that Kate was on earth somewhere?"

There was an old cotton-wood stump in the clearing, and he stood against it so thoughtful and still that he became the object of attention of bats. He hit at them angrily and recommenced his prowl.

Hour after hour he tramped through the dripping grass, biting against fate. Cascaes, who did not work unless he was driven, had long since checked his tally of kernels, and gone to bed. The factory lamps had one by one gone out. The night noises of the forest that hemmed them in were in full swing. His thin clothes were sodden with the damp, and by every law of Africa he was gathering unto himself the seeds of disease. But still he tramped on, in and out amongst the huts and litter, wrestling with his misery.

The thing which in the end lifted him out of this unhealthy pit of self-pity was commonplace enough in its way. As he was passing a small rude shelter of boughs and thatch, there came to his ears a very unmistakable human groan.

It was a temporary hut run up by some trader who was waiting his turn to do business at the factory, and the groan was of that timbre which told that it was wrenched from a strong man by deadly pain. At another time Carter would probably have passed on. One grows callous to suffering in West Africa, and to interfere with a sick native seldom brings thanks and very frequently produces complications. But something just then moved him to play the Samaritan.

He put his head through the entrance and peered into the darkness. "Well," he said, "who's here, and what's the matter?"

A voice replied in stately Haûsa, "O, Effendi, I am close upon death, and it is hard to die far from one's own lands and people."

"Let's have a look at you," said Carter, in what he knew of the same tongue, eked out with Kroo and Okky. He scraped a damp and reluctant match. "Holy Christopher! What have you been doing to your thigh?"

"As I marched along the road to here, a leopard sprang and seized me, but the men that were with me speared him, and so I escaped with my life. They made a litter, and on it carried me to this place. And here they left me in the hands of Allah, whilst they followed up their own private affairs."

"But, man, the wound's alive. Why didn't you have it dressed?"

"It was written that the wound should be as it is."

"Rot. You stay here another ten minutes or so till I get the tackle, and then I will clean it out for you."

"Effendi, it is written that Allah sent the things that are in the wound, and with due submission I will not have them touched."

"Hum," said Carter, "now this requires argument. You savvy Constantinople? I mean I'Stamboul?"

"There lives the Kaleef, the chief of the Faithful of Islam."

"You've got it in once. Now, are you keeping yourself posted in the Sultan's--that is the Kaleef's latest readings of the Koran? You are not. I can see you have let yourself get thoroughly behind the times. What's your name?"

"Ali ben Hossein."

"Well, Ali, I know what's the matter with you spiritually. You've been thinking too much of the things of this life--fighting, trading and so on. You've spread your mat and faced Mecca, and said your daily prayer in a formal sort of way, but you've been neglecting the moolah. You have been lax in your attendance at mosque, and for a fiver you aren't half the man at the Koran you used to be."

"The Effendi is very wise."

"I am. I can't help it."

"He has hit upon this Believer's sin."

"Dead on the spot. So now let's get to the point. In your ignorance, you believe that Allah sent all those crawling horrors that are in your wound?"

"For His own wise purposes He sent them. Allah can do no wrong."

"You are mixing up theological facts. Allah can do no wrong. But what about Sheitan?"

"I spit upon his name, O Effendi," said Ali ben Hossein, and did it.

"Hear now then the pronouncement of the Kaleef Abdul Hamed of I'Stamboul. The unclean things that haunt the wounds of the Faithful are no longer sent by Allah as a test of Faith. They are sent now by Sheitan as a torment to True Believers, and as an antidote, the Prophet, through the Kaleef, has sent a liquid of his own devising, of which by a happy chance I have a portion in the factory."

"Is it green in color?"

"Green as the skirts of the houris of Paradise," said Carter, and thanked heaven for a small parcel of aniline dyes (green amongst them) which had been sent by an enterprising Bradford dyeware merchant, to the order of a dyer in far off Kano.

"Then," said Ali ben Hossein simply, "if you, O Effendi, can relieve me from the torments of Sheitan, from which I am suffering, I and my sons will remember your name in the fullest gratitude. Have you the holy liquid here?"

"Not in my pocket, O Ali ben Hossein, for I am not a djinn. But there is a medicine chest up at the factory, and within it is a bottle of crystal, blue in color, in which are tabloids which bear the giaour name of perchloride of mercury. They and the aniline green may take a bit of finding, but presently when I've got a solution made, and tinted to a True Believer's taste, I will return here and work upon you that cure of which I am sure that the Kaleef Abdul would approve if he'd a thigh as bad as yours, and had ever heard of an antiseptic dressing. So see to it that you don't slip through the gates of Paradise whilst I am gone. D'you understand? The houris won't look twice at a Haûsa with a leg as worm-eaten as yours."

Now, Carter gathered from a casual inspection by two damp matches that ben Hossein's thigh was pretty bad, but he had not made allowance for the toughness of a water-drinking, spare-eating Moslem. When he came back with a parrafin lamp, followed by White-Man's-Trouble, who carried a bowl of warm water and other things, and commenced his amateur surgery, he was amazed, and he was sickened. Like most traders in the West Coast factories, he had acquired through almost daily practice a certain deftness in cleansing and repairing wounds; but here in the thigh of this great muscular Haûsa was a grid of gashes whose untended horrors went far beyond all his previous experience.

The fact that the man had not bled to death, or died of shock at the first impact, and the further fact that he had withstood the attacks of all the abominable live things that preyed thereafter upon his open flesh, were a wonderful testimonial to his constitutional toughness; and the detail that in spite of his fortitude he went clammy and limp when Carter commenced dressing the wounds, was only what could be expected. But it seemed that five days had elapsed since the man had been brought in and left, and during that time the other merchants outside the fort, with the ordinary callousness of Africans for one another, had neither brought him food nor reported his calamity. On the other hand, they had stolen his goods and gone their ways, otherwise non-interferent. And as a consequence the man was three parts starved when Carter found him and had his vitality perilously lowered.

Carter had, perhaps, as has been stated, much of the West Coast trader's callousness for the native, but he certainly had all of the surgeon's interest in a patient. After he had dressed the wounds he tried his best to bring his patient back to consciousness, and then for the first time only did he realize how near to the Borderland the man had crept. He sent White-Man's-Trouble flying this way and that on his errands, and with all the limited knowledge in his power fought Death for the Haûsa's life till the fatal hour of dawn was well past.

And so he was found by Miss O'Neill at 5 A.M., white, shaken and black-eyed, attired in stained and sodden clothes, squatting in a miserable hutch that reeked of iodoform, and welcoming with joy Ali ben Hossein's ungracious return to a world he had so nearly left.

Miss O'Neill regarded him for awhile with a pinched lip, and then "I think you are perfectly disgraceful," said she. "At least you might have let me know what you were doing, so that I could have come to help part of the time."

Carter blinked at her for a moment with tired brown eyes and then pulled himself together. "I beg your pardon for not doing as you wished. But I didn't know that you were interested in niggers, if there was no chance of making a dividend out of them. I rather looked upon this as an out-of-office-hours job; as a piece of private amusement of my own, in fact, and so I did not dare to repeat it."

"Well," said Kate, seating herself beside the sick man, "perhaps I was hateful to you after supper, indeed I'll admit that I was. But you are being far more hateful to me now, and as that should tickle your vanity as a man, perhaps you'll be generous enough to call it quits. Trouble, will you kindly take Mr. Carter back to the factory and give him a large dose of quinine and all the hot, scalding tea he will drink, and then put him to bed, and see to it that there are no insects inside his mosquito bar."

"I fit," said the Krooboy. "An' I got bottle of White man's medicine dat I pinch from dem Cappie Image. I give dem Carter a drink of him."

"You will do nothing of the sort. Dem Cappie Image patent medicine plenty bad ju-ju for Mr. Carter. So you will do exactly as I ordered you. Ah, and here's Laura. Now, my dear, if you don't want the man to whom you're engaged to die before you marry him, you'd better look after him and his health very narrowly. There, get away out of this, the pair of you, and make up your silly quarrel, whatever it may be."

"But, Kate, George and I have no quarrel. Why, it was you----"

"If you haven't a quarrel, my dear, invent one, if it's only for the amusement of making it up. I'm told it's one of the chief luxuries of an engagement. Now, please go, or you'll disturb Hossein. Hossein's the man who wants attention here, and I can't have you bothering about the place till he's better."

Hossein was in fact the lucky man. Miss O'Neill, for reasons best known to herself, nursed him in person; Carter retained his interest as original discoverer; White-Man's-Trouble fussed round him because it was the popular thing to do, and Laura was also diligent in her attendance on the sick room for reasons well-known to herself.

But Ali ben Hossein had all a Moslem gentleman's diffidence with women, and he said little enough to either Laura or Kate; the Krooboy was his caste inferior, and he spoke to him only to give curt orders; and it was to Carter alone that he was communicative.

His native tongue was Haûsa, of course, but he had been a trader all his life, and that in West Africa entails a knowledge of languages. Carter knew little enough of Haûsa, but he was handy with Okky and sound on Kroo, and so when one vocabulary failed him, he passed on to another, and was generally understood. Thus, by very rapid degrees an intimacy grew between them, to as far an extent as the color barrier would permit.

They talked on weapons and they talked on war; they talked of sport as each of them understood it; they talked on horse-breeding as it was practised in Kano and Sokoto, and also of horse-breeding as it was carried on in the Craven district and the Yorkshire dales.

Carter tried without any success whatever to make Hossein understand the humor of the battle of the roses as it was waged between his father and mother in the Yorkshire vicarage; the Haûsa in his turn gave the light side of a slave-hunting raid, and made Carter's flesh creep.

They had abundant interests in common, too, in the romance of commerce, and discussed regretfully the decay of ivory and the sensational rise of rubber. Carter as the paid servant of O'Neill and Craven tried to hear of rubber lands which could be bought and resold to an English company, but Ali ben Hossein was emphatic in his refusal to help a white immigration onto the acres of his fatherland.

"Let us talk as traders, oh Effendi. Do not ask me to be the traitor who will make smooth the path for the invader. And for the present I bid you to consider this shortage in the supply of pink kola nuts. Now, the white kola nuts, which have not that dryness which is demanded by the palates of the Western Soudan, we can get from Lagos and the Coast factories in larger quantities than ever. But the growers declare the crop of pink nuts to be practically a failure this year, and therein I say they lie."

And so on, with matter which had too technical a flavor to carry general interest.

Now, the leopard had clawed Ali ben Hossein's thigh grievously, and the subsequent neglect of the wound had been abominable, but the man had been a clean liver and his toughness was great. In ten days he could hobble, and in a fortnight announced his departure.

"I am a merchant without merchandise, Effendi, and must needs be back about my affairs. If I do not gather them into my hands again another will."

"I'd stand you tick to the extent of a dozen loads of goods if I had 'em," said Carter cordially, "but as you've seen for yourself, the factory's cleaned out. And Allah knows when the next steamer will drive in."

"May your tribe increase, Effendi. I have had too much at your hands already. But though no money may pass over what you have done, yet I ask you to accept a gift, that is a mere token."

It was a piece of gray stone which sprouted with rich brown crystals. It was shaped like a squat duck, some inch and a half long, and Ali ben Hossein wore it alongside the little leather parcel which held a verse of the Koran and hung by a thong from his neck.

"O Effendi, you are young, and that will bring you pleasure more than could be bought with ten quills of gold. Wear that, and your grief will fade."

"Poof!" said Carter, "I've no griefs."

Ali ben Hossein waved aside the statement with a long slim hand, the hand of the Haûsa swordsman for whose narrow grip Central African armorers make sword hilts that no grown Englishman can use. "O Effendi, my sickness was of the leg. Neither my eyes nor my ears were touched by the leopard, and since I lay here I have both seen and heard. There is a woman that I have watched, a woman with brown hair that has in it the glint of copper. She flaunts you now, as is the way of women with those they love; but she is the one you desire, and presently (having this charm) you will take her to wife. Indeed, she will come to your house without purchase and of free will."

"You mistake," said Carter with a sigh. "It is the black-haired one that I am contracted to marry."

Ben Hossein smiled. He was not to be turned from his idea by a small argument like that. "You may take her as the lesser wife, but I know who will rule your harem, Effendi."

"You polygamous old scoundrel! I beg your pardon, ben Hossein, but you're on the wrong tack, and so please let us change the subject. This charm, this duck, is made of what we call tin-stone. Does it come from Haûsaland?"

"No, Effendi. It is found nearer to here than the Haûsa country. There is a great island of red twisted stone that rears itself up out of the bush, and this stone that the duck is made of lies amongst it. There is no value in the charm as a stone, but only value in its shape, which is that of a duck as you see, Effendi. Half the twisted mountain is made of that stone, and the river that runs along its base at times eats into it."

"How far is it from here?"

"Twelve--no, thirteen marches. Look, I will spread this sand upon the floor and draw you the roads.... But the country is evil, Effendi, and though you go there and spend a lifetime in search, yet will you not find another stone formed like a duck. To get this, my grandfather sent a hundred slaves who raked amongst the screes for a year."

"This is tin-ore," said Carter, "and I tell you frankly, ben Hossein, that there is a fortune in what you have told me."

"I wish," said ben Hossein gravely, "that there were ten fortunes, and so I could perhaps repay one-tithe of what I owe to you, Effendi. May Allah be with you. I go now back towards my people, and if Allah will, we shall meet again."

"Now, this stone and this tale must go to Kate," said Carter to himself, and went in towards the factory and up the stairs to the veranda. Kate came out of the mess room to meet him, and waved a cablegram.

"I have just de-coded it," she cried exultingly. "They have accepted my terms."

"I wish you would de-code the 'they.'"

"The German firm that owned Mokki before we came."

"What, the people you bought it from?"

She nodded.

"But why on earth sell it back to them?"

"Because, my dear Mr. Carter, they are going to give me £9,000 for the produce we have collected, and another £8,000 for the fort and the good-will of the business. How's that? £17,000 cash against a £1,500 outlay in three months. That's better than staying out here in West Africa."

Carter had been carrying the duck in his hand. He put it into his pocket. "I don't wonder you're exultant. I suppose no other girl on earth ever made a coup like that. And as for us here at the factory, that means our occupation's gone?"

"Oh, I hope you'll go back to Malla-Nulla, where you were, and work for us there."

"I think not. As you're going home, and I cannot be of any immediate use to O'Neill and Craven, I prefer to leave the firm's employ if you'll let me?"

"We shall be really sorry to lose you. But perhaps you have something better in view?"

"To tell the truth, I have. And it strikes me if I'm to make a fortune, I must look out for it myself."

"I quite agree with you," said Kate. "What was that you were going to show me? The thing you put in your pocket, I mean?"

"A keepsake that was given me. It's a charm, a ju-ju that will bring fortune to somebody, and I was going to give it to you. But on your own recommendation I shall keep it for myself."

"You are quite right. It will be safer for us to go our own several ways from here."