“Well, there’s been a lot of trouble over a trumpery wooden idol.  I fancy we’d better burn it out of harm’s way.”

“Not much,” said Nilssen with a sigh.  “I’ve found out where the value comes in, and as you’ve earned them fairly and squarely, the dividends are yours to stick to.  One of those looking-glass eyes was loose, and I picked it out.  There was a bit of green glass behind.  I picked out the other eye, and there was a bit of green glass at the back of that too.”

“Oh, the niggers’ll use anything for ju-ju.”

“Wait a bit.  I’d got my notions as to what that green glass was, and so I toted them in my pocket up and down the river and asked every man who was likely to know a jewel what he thought.  They aren’t green glass at all.  They’re emeralds.  They’re come from the Lord knows where, but that doesn’t matter.  They’re worth fifty pounds apiece at the very lowest, and they’re yours, my lad, to do what you like with.”

Captain Kettle lay back on his pillow and smiled complacently.  “That money’ll just set up my Missis nicely in a lodging-house.  Now I can go on with my work here, and know that whatever happens she and the kids are provided for.”

“Eh, well,” said Nilssen with a sigh, “she’ll be nicely fixed up now.  I wish I could make provision like that for my old women.”

CHAPTER III.

A QUICK WAY WITH REBELS.

Another bullet came silently up out of the distance, and the nigger second engineer of the launch gave a queer little whimper and fell down flop, and lay with his flat nose nuzzling the still warm boiler.  A hole, which showed up red and angry against the black wool just underneath his grass cap, made the diagnosis of his injury an easy matter.

The noise of the shot came to them quite a long time afterward, when the little puff of smoke which had spirted up from the distant sandbank had already begun to thin under the sunshine; but it was that gun-crack, and not the sight of the dead engineer, which gave the working negroes their final scare.  With loud children’s cries, and queer dodgings of fear, they pitched down their working tools, and fled to where the other black soldiers and passengers were lying on the iron floor-plates of the launch, in security below her water-line.

The Belgian Commandant, from his shelter at the other side of the boiler, swore volubly, and Clay, the English doctor, laughed and twanged out a music-hall tune on his banjo.  Kettle, intent on getting his vessel once more under command, was for driving the negro crew back to their work by the simple methods peculiar to the British merchant officer.  But this Commandant Balliot forbade, and, as he was Kettle’s superior in the Congo Free State service, that small mariner had (very much against his grain) to obey.

“We shall have these fellows rebelling next,” said the Commandant, “if you push them too hard; and if they join the rest, where shall we be?”