That was the root of the trouble!  There was nobody there; and being left there alone with their weakness, they became daily more like a pair of accomplices than like a couple of devoted friends.  They had heard nothing from home for eight months.  Every evening they said, “To-morrow we shall see the steamer.”  But one of the Company’s steamers had been wrecked, and the Director was busy with the other, relieving very distant and important stations on the main river.  He thought that the useless station, and the useless men, could wait.  Meantime Kayerts and Carlier lived on rice boiled without salt, and cursed the Company, all Africa, and the day they were born.  One must have lived on such diet to discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one’s food may become.  There was literally nothing else in the station but rice and coffee; they drank the coffee without sugar.  The last fifteen lumps Kayerts had solemnly locked away in his box, together with a half-bottle of Cognac, “in case of sickness,” he explained.  Carlier approved.  “When one is sick,” he said, “any little extra like that is cheering.”

They waited.  Rank grass began to sprout over the courtyard.  The bell never rang now.  Days passed, silent, exasperating, and slow.  When the two men spoke, they snarled; and their silences were bitter, as if tinged by the bitterness of their thoughts.

One day after a lunch of boiled rice, Carlier put down his cup untasted, and said:  “Hang it all!  Let’s have a decent cup of coffee for once.  Bring out that sugar, Kayerts!”

“For the sick,” muttered Kayerts, without looking up.

“For the sick,” mocked Carlier.  “Bosh! . . .  Well!  I am sick.”

“You are no more sick than I am, and I go without,” said Kayerts in a peaceful tone.

“Come! out with that sugar, you stingy old slave-dealer.”

Kayerts looked up quickly.  Carlier was smiling with marked insolence.  And suddenly it seemed to Kayerts that he had never seen that man before.  Who was he?  He knew nothing about him.  What was he capable of?  There was a surprising flash of violent emotion within him, as if in the presence of something undreamt-of, dangerous, and final.  But he managed to pronounce with composure—­

“That joke is in very bad taste.  Don’t repeat it.”

“Joke!” said Carlier, hitching himself forward on his seat.  “I am hungry—­I am sick—­I don’t joke!  I hate hypocrites.  You are a hypocrite.  You are a slave-dealer.  I am a slave-dealer.  There’s nothing but slave-dealers in this cursed country.  I mean to have sugar in my coffee to-day, anyhow!”

“I forbid you to speak to me in that way,” said Kayerts with a fair show of resolution.

“You!—­What?” shouted Carlier, jumping up.

Kayerts stood up also.  “I am your chief,” he began, trying to master the shakiness of his voice.

“What?” yelled the other.  “Who’s chief?  There’s no chief here.  There’s nothing here:  there’s nothing but you and I. Fetch the sugar—­you pot-bellied ass.”