As he sat opposite her, talking in off-hand, picturesque fashion of incidents in his adventurous life, Clytie could not help looking with a feeling somewhat akin to awe at the man who had gone through such things and could speak of them so lightly. She listened, interposed a question here and there, wondered what it would feel like to treat those memories in so familiar a fashion. A new page of life seemed to lie open before her, quivering with sensations beyond her ken. “Didn't you ever feel horribly afraid?” asked Caroline, while he was sketching some of his more recent exploring experiences. “I did so,” he confessed frankly, “but I had my devils well under control. I had the power to string a mutineer up on the nearest tree or to pot him with my revolver, and somehow they rather funked me. If it had entered their woolly heads to go for me all together they would have made short work of me--but no one liked to take the initiative.” “Did you ever try kindness, on these expeditions--by way of experiment?” asked Farquharson. “Not much. You can't afford to fool away your life for the sake of an experiment. Oh, no! my dear sir, the noble savage does not swarm much round about the slave tracks in Central Africa. The Zulus may be different. I don't know--I've never seen much of them--but Fuzzywuz and his neighbours can only understand brute force.” “I don't quite see, now, how you got all that power,” said Farquharson. “Did you establish yourself as a little king--or what?” “Oh, no!” returned Hammerdyke, laughing. “When I had finished with the Soudan I wanted to while away a few months in the interior, and as the Belgians wanted a road made through the forest I offered to see things were done straight for them. As for the authority--judicial and that sort of thing--one takes that as a matter of course. The niggers don't know anything about it, except that there is a white man bossing them. They think it's all right, so what does it matter?” “Then you hire a set of woolly-headed navvies, and if they lapse from your standard of virtue, you shoot them--is that the idea?” “Somewhat. In mere slips one employs the _argumentum ad bacculinum_. It isn't pleasant, but it's the only way.” “You are not going back again, are you, Thornton?” Caroline asked, wishing to turn the conversation. She believed in Thornton, in his power by divine right to blow all the tribes of Central Africa from the cannon's mouth if it so pleased him, but she saw that George was not sympathetic. It was a sore little point with her that her husband did not share all her enthusiasm for Thornton. “You are going to settle down now, really?” she added. “Who knows?” he replied. “All things become monotonous after a time--even playing potentate. That's why I am here--with the intention of giving civilisation a chance. Some fine morning I may wake up and think that it would be nice to have a little excitement, and then I may pack up my things and start for No Man's Land again.”