Having quit the country--I fervently hope for good--it will do no harm to admit that my constant moving was due less to the demands of business than to a desire to be elsewhere when the Belgian officials arrived. The Belgian Kongo is just north of the province of Ticao, and I had been skimming its edges, buying ivory and rubber from the natives across the line. The colonial government does not encourage independent traders, and it would not have been pleasant for me had I been caught. In Ticao, of course, I was not molested. A small honorarium to the governor of the province made him my friend, and my conscience did not bother me. I paid ten times the prices the natives usually got and I imposed no fines or contributions on the villages. If you know anything about the Kongo, you will regard me as I regarded myself--as more or less of a benefactor. After three months of that, though, and two or three close shaves from a choice of fighting or capture, I was glad to get back to civilization, even such civilization as Evan Graham's casa. Away from Ticao, Evan Graham would have been shunned for the sort of man he was. In Ticao, one is not particular. There are few enough Anglo-Saxon white men of any sort--the two consuls, half a dozen missionaries, and about three men like myself, who take chances in the interior. The rest of the population is either Portuguese or black, preponderatingly black, with a blending layer of half- and quarter-breeds. Evan was a cad and several different kinds of an animal, but he was a white man, he talked English such as one hears at home, and he had a pool table and civilized drinks all of four weeks' march from the city of Ticao. I always stopped overnight with him on my way back from the interior. I knew that he had bribed the governor to overlook the law which prescribes that no white man shall settle more than forty kilometers from a fort, because he wanted to have a free hand with his natives. I knew, too, that he had no shred of title to the land he tilled, or to the services of the natives he forced to work in his fields. He had come out there with four or five of the dingy-brown half-castes that are overseers for half the rocas in Ticao, had frightened or coerced the inhabitants of three villages into signing the silly little contracts that bind them to work for a white man for so many years at ridiculous wage, and now had a plantation that was tremendously profitable. I never had understood just how he made the blacks serve him so well. He seemed to have them frightened nearly to death. Most plantations have the slave quarters--the blacks are officially "_contrahidos_," or contract laborers, but in practice they are slaves--most plantations have the slave quarters surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and let savage dogs loose outside the fence at night, but Graham allowed his natives to live in the villages they had occupied before his coming and seemed to take no precautions against their running away.