“Ah,” said Kettle; “I fancied some one had been mixing up finely powdered glass in your chop.  It’s an old trick, and you don’t twig it till the doctors cut you up after you’re dead.”

“As if I wasn’t up to a kid’s game like that!” said the sick man with feeble contempt.  “No, this is regular ju-ju work, and it’s beyond the Belgian doctor here, and it’s beyond all other white men.  There’s only one cure, and that’s to be got at the place where the poisoning palaver was worked from.”

“And where’s that?”

Captain Nilssen nodded down the narrow slip of sand, and mangroves, and nut palms, on which the settlement of Banana is built, and gazed with his sunken eyes at the smooth, green slopes of Africa beyond.  “Dem village he lib for bush,” he said.

“Up country village, eh?  They’re a nice lot in at the back there, according to accounts.  But can’t you arrange it by your friend the ambassador?”

“He’s not the kind of fool to come back.  He’s man enough to know he’d get pretty well dropped on if I could get him in my reach again.”

“Then tell the authorities here, and get some troops sent up.”

“What’d be the good of that?  They might go, or they mightn’t.  If they did, they’d do a lot of shooting, collect a lot of niggers’ ears, steal what there was to pick up, and then come back.  But would they get what I want out of the witch-doctor?  Not much.  They’d never so much as see the beggar.  He’d take far too big care of his mangy hide.  He wouldn’t stop for fighting-palaver.  He’d be off for bush, one-time.  No, Kettle, if I’m to get well, some white man will have to go up by his lonesome for me, and square that witch-doctor by some trick of the tongue.”

“Which is another way of saying you want me to risk my skin to get you your prescription?”

“But, my lad, I won’t ask you to go for nothing.  I don’t suppose you are out here on the Congo just for your health.  You’ve said you’ve got a wife at home, and I make no doubt you’re as fond of her and as eager to provide for her as I am for any of mine.  Well and good.  Here’s an offer.  Get me cured, and I’ll dash you the ju-ju to make what you can out of it.”

Kettle stretched out his fingers.  “Right,” he said.  “We’ll trade on that.”  And the pair of them shook hands over the bargain.

It was obvious, if the thing was to be done at all, it must be set about quickly.  Nilssen was an utter wreck.  Prolonged residence in this pestilential Congo had sapped his constitution; the poison was constantly eating at him; and he must either get relief in a very short time, or give up the fight and die.  So that same afternoon saw Kettle journeying in a dug-out canoe over the beer-colored waters of the river, up stream, toward the witch-doctor’s village.

Two savages (one of them suffering from a bad attack of yaws) propelled the craft from her forward part in erratic zig-zags; amidships sat Captain Kettle in a Madeira chair under a green-lined white umbrella; and behind him squatted his personal attendant, a Krooboy, bearing the fine old Coast name of Brass Pan.  The crushed marigold smell from the river closed them in, and the banks crept by in slow procession.