"The secret is, I don't move along too fast. I've been in this village a fortnight. I don't know when I shall make up my mind to pull out and go on." "Not till you've eaten it bare or are forced off some other way, I suppose. You're a curious envoy for a confiding employer in Liverpool to send out into the bush." Slade grinned. "Old Godfrey wouldn't have done it. But this new K. O'Neill hasn't seen my cutaway chin. K.'s a hustler, but he's young, remarkably young." "Have you done anything in the way of getting him a rubber property?" "Well, curiously enough I have. At least, I've bought him up a few square miles of country that rubber vines would grow on well enough if it was cleared, and planted, and tended, and no one put ju-ju on them." "Is it get-at-able?" "It's on some river or other. The ditch isn't marked on the map, but I daresay a steamer could get up if it was worth while. The title's as good as one could expect." "That means it won't be jumped so long as you pay fifty pounds a year to the next claimant." "I should say five-and-twenty will fix him," said Slade lazily. "You see he's headman of the next village and he thinks he's got some unproductive bush to sell himself. I've rammed into his skull the great truth that his deal can't go through if he starts trying to jump his neighbor's land and unsteadies the market. I think those considerations will outweigh even his nigger's love for litigation--" He went on to give listlessly enough a few more details of the transaction. Mr. Smith was well-versed in the ways of West African diplomacy, and could appreciate to a nicety all the haggling and the patience and the tedious arguments that had gone to build up these complicated bargains. He screwed in his eyeglass and looked at Slade attentively. "I wonder," he said, "why you always make yourself out to be such an infernal waster? You know you must have been doing some thundering good work. I couldn't have put that deal through, and I know my West Africa as well as you do or better. There's not one man in five thousand could have managed it. What's your trick?" "Oh, I found myself in comfortable quarters, and I couldn't make up my mind to move on and try more likely country elsewhere. So I stayed and talked rubber-palaver with the headman. One had to do something for amusement. Besides they'd a tree of alligator pears in the village that were exactly ripe, and it would have been a crime to leave them to benighted Africans. By the way, very rude of me not to ask before, but what have you done since you left the Coast?" "Got into a very ugly hole," said Swizzle-Stick Smith shortly, "and wriggled out of it by the skin of my teeth." "Rubber-palaver?" "No." "Oh, sorry for inquiring. I thought that was what you came up for?" "So it was, and I started off from the Coast with a full intention of carrying out O'Neill and Craven's business. But I got led off on an old trail."