I fancy that I have made it clear before that Captain Kettle was a man possessed not only of an iron nerve, but also of all a sailor’s handiness with his fingers; but here was a piece of work that required all his coolness and dexterity.  At home, on an operating table, with everything at hand that antiseptic surgery could provide, with highly trained surgeons and highly trained nurses in goodly numbers, it would have been a formidable undertaking; but there, among those savage surroundings, in that awful loneliness which a white man feels so far away from all his kin, it was a very different matter.

It makes me shiver when I think how that little sailor must have realized his risks and his responsibility.  It was a situation that would have fairly paralyzed most men.  But from what can be gathered from the last letter that the patient ever wrote, it is clear that Kettle carried out the operation with indomitable firmness and decision; and if indeed some of his movements were crude, he had grasped all the main points of his hurried teaching, and he made no single mistake of any but pedantic importance.

Clay woke up from the anaesthetic, sick, shaken, but still courageous as ever.  “Well,” he gasped, “you’ve made a fine dot-and-go-one of me, Skipper, and that’s a fact.  When you chuck the sea, and get back to England, and set up in a snug country practice as general practitioner, you’ll be able to look back on your first operation with pride.”

Kettle, shaken and white, regarded him from a native stool in the middle of the hut.  “I can’t think,” he said, “how any men can be doctors whilst there’s still a crossing to sweep.”

“Oh,” said Clay, “you’re new at it now, and a bit jolted up.  But the trade has its points.  I’ll argue it out with you some day.  But just at present I’m going to try and sleep.  I’m a bit jolted up, too.”

Now, it is a melancholy fact to record that Dr. Clay did not pull round again after his accident and the subsequent operation.  To any one who knows the climate, the reason will be easily understood.  In that heated air of Central Equatorial Africa, tainted with all manner of harmful germs, a scratch will take a month to heal, and any considerable flesh wound may well prove a death warrant.  Captain Kettle nursed his patient with a woman’s tenderness, and Clay himself struggled gamely against his fate; but the ills of the place were too strong for him, and the inevitable had to be.

But the struggle was no quick thing of a day, or even of a week.  The man lingered wirily on, and in the mean while Kettle saw the marvellous political structure, which with so much labor and daring he had built up, crumbling to pieces, as it were, before his very eyes.  A company of Arab slave-traders had entered the district, and were recapturing his subject villages one by one.

At the first attack runners came to him imploring help.  It was useless to send his half-baked soldiers without going himself.  They knew no other leader; there was not a negro among them fit to take a command; and he himself was tied.  He said nothing to Clay, but just sent a refusal, and remained at his post.