There, with puzzled interest, Everett watched them sitting at separate tables, surrounded by mutual friends, excitedly playing dominoes.  Outside the cafe, Matadi lay smothered and sweltering in a black, living darkness, and, save for the rush of the river, in a silence that continued unbroken across a jungle as wide as Europe.  Inside the dominoes clicked, the glasses rang on the iron tables, the oil lamps glared upon the pallid, sweating faces of clerks, upon the tanned, sweating skins of officers; and the Italian doctor and the Belgian lieutenant, each with murder in his heart, laughed, shrugged, gesticulated, waiting for the moment to strike.

“But why doesn’t some one do something?” demanded Everett.  “Arrest them, or reason with them.  Everybody knows about it.  It seems a pity not to do something.”

Upsher nodded his head.  Dimly he recognized a language with which he once had been familiar.  “I know what you mean,” he agreed.  “Bind ’em over to keep the peace.  And a good job, too!  But who?” he demanded vaguely.  “That’s what I say!  Who?” From the confusion into which Everett’s appeal to forgotten memories had thrown it, his mind suddenly emerged.  “But what’s the use!” he demanded.  “Don’t you see,” he explained triumphantly, “if those two crazy men were fit to listen to sense, they’d have sense enough not to kill each other!”

Each succeeding evening Everett watched the two potential murderers with lessening interest.  He even made a bet with Upsher, of a bottle of fruit salt, that the chief of police would be the one to die.

A few nights later a man, groaning beneath his balcony, disturbed his slumbers.  He cursed the man, and turned his pillow to find the cooler side.  But all through the night the groans, though fainter, broke into his dreams.  At intervals some traditions of past conduct tugged at Everett’s sleeve, and bade him rise and play the good Samaritan.  But, indignantly, he repulsed them.  Were there not many others within hearing?  Were there not the police?  Was it his place to bind the wounds of drunken stokers?  The groans were probably a trick, to entice him, unarmed, into the night.  And so, just before the dawn, when the mists rose, and the groans ceased, Everett, still arguing, sank with a contented sigh into forgetfulness.

When he woke, there was beneath his window much monkey-like chattering, and he looked down into the white face and glazed eyes of the Italian doctor, lying in the gutter and staring up at him.  Below his shoulder-blades a pool of blood shone evilly in the blatant sunlight.

Across the street, on his balcony, Upsher, in pajamas and mosquito boots, was shivering with fever and stifling a yawn.  “You lose!” he called.