"Will you hold your slobbering tongue? If you can't, say so, and I'll stop it once and for always. I've told you my wish; to you or anyone else I'm Smith, or Swizzle-Stick Smith, which you like. I've no connection with anything that went before, and 'pon my soul, as you're the only man now alive that knows it, I believe I'd be a lot safer if you were out of the way." Slade turned his back petulantly. "Oh, do stop this wrangle. I'll call you Swizzle-Stick Smith to the end of the chapter, and forget that you were ever anything other than a drunken old palm-oil ruffian, if it pleases you. Come to my hut and chop. I shot some parrots this morning. They'll taste a bit like high rook, but they are better than tinned stuff anyway. They came over finely; real raketers. It was quite like the old days at home. This gun, by the way, is about my last link with ancestral splendor. Look there, a Holland. They wanted me to have ejectors, I remember, but I wouldn't." Mr. Smith screwed his eyeglass into his other eye and straightened the new black silk ribbon by which it hung. "No," he said grimly, "that was very wise of you, especially as ejectors weren't invented when that gun was built. I wonder what sort of a tale you told Image before he trusted you with it?" "What are you driving at? What's Cappie Image to do with it?" "That's my gun. I had it--well, as you've started the forbidden subject already--I had it before the fall. Image saw it at Malla-Nulla one day when I was full up and walked off with it, and I never managed to get it back from him. He always said the beach was too bad to risk letting a surf boat bring it ashore. Well, you may keep the thing for the present, and I'll take a bowlful of your parrot stew by way of rent. This the house? You've managed to find yourself pretty comfortable quarters, I see." The house was a series of rooms packed round an internal courtyard. The outer walls were of wattle, luted with mud thrown onto them in vigorous handfuls, and left to bake hard in the sun. The roof was a pile of untidy thatch, the floor of hardened mud, and in the middle of the courtyard was an ineffective shade-tree scorched by the smoke of the cooking fires. Beyond this house sprawled the other houses of a small West African village, with the usual squalor heaped between them.