"Naturally. We've been ground baiting pretty liberally these last few weeks. Well, I guess we are about through with the business now. Not nervous about yourself, eh?" "No," said Kettle, and touched his cap. "God's been looking on at this gamble, as I told Rabeira last night, and He dealt over the beans the way they were earned." "That's all right," said Nilssen cheerfully. "When a man keeps his courage he don't get small-pox, you bet." "Well," said Kettle, "I suppose we'll be fumigated and get a clean bill in about ten days from now, and I'm sure I don't mind the bit of extra rest. I've got a lot of stuff I want to write up. It's come in my head lately, and I've had no time to get it down on paper. I shouldn't wonder but what it makes a real stir some day when it's printed; it's real good stuff. I wonder if that yellow-faced Belgian doctor will live to give us _pratique_?" "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."