“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 diseases out of you.”

“If I go to sea,” said the pilot wearily, “I shall be stitched 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.”