When a boy has the sea in his blood, when he prays in church for plague, pestilence and famine, for battle and murder and sudden death, his parents will do well to thrash him tame. For then if he can be tamed he may turn out well as a respectable clerk; but if he has the force of character to get what he wants he will prove himself and be, perhaps, like John Boyes, of Hull, a king at twenty-five. Boyes ran away to sea, and out of the tame humdrum life of the modern merchant service made for himself a world of high adventure. As a seaman he landed at Durban, then earned his way up-country in all sorts of trades until he enlisted in the Matabeleland Mounted Police, then fought his way through the second Matabele war. Afterward he was a trader, then an actor, next at sea again, and at Zanzibar joined an Arab trading dhow. When the dhow was wrecked, and the crew appealed to Allah, Boyes took command, so coming to Mombasa. From here the crown colony was building a railway to Uganda, a difficult job because the lions ate all the laborers they could catch, and had even the cheek to gobble up white officials. Up-country, the black troops were enjoying a mutiny, the native tribes were prickly, the roads were impossible and there was no food to be had. Boyes was very soon at the head of a big transport company, working with donkey carts and native carriers to carry food for the authorities. Northward of the railway was Mount Kenia, a lofty snow-clad volcano; and round his foothills covering a tract the size of Yorkshire or of Massachusetts lived the Kikuyu, a negro people numbering half a million, who always made a point of besieging British camps, treating our caravans to volleys of poisoned darts, and murdering every visitor who came within their borders. Boyes went into that country to buy food to supply to the railway workers (1898). He went with an old Martini-Henry rifle, and seven carriers, over a twelve thousand foot pass of the hills, and down through bamboo forest into a populous country, where at sight of him the war cry went from hill to hill, and five hundred warriors assembled for their first look at a white man. Through his interpreter he explained that he came to trade for food. Presently he showed what his old rifle could do, and when the bullet bored a hole through a tree he told them that it had gone through the mountain beyond and out at the other side. A man with such a gun was worthy of respect, especially when his drugs worked miracles among the sick. Next day the neighbors attacked this tribe which had received a white man instead of killing him, but Boyes with his rifle turned defeat to victory, and with iodoform treated the wounded. The stuff smelt so strong that there could be no doubt of its magic.