"In what particular section of the devil department have I been busy?" he asked in the vernacular. The prisoner was gazing at him steadily. "Master," he replied, "it is not my business to understand these things. It is said to me, 'kill'--and I kill." Sanders wasted no more time in vain questions. The man was put in irons, the nose of the steamer turned again down stream, and the Commissioner resumed his vigil. Midway between B'Fani and Lakaloli he came to a tying-up place. Here there were dead trees for the chopping, and he put his men to replenish his stock of fuel. He was annoyed, not because a man had attempted to take his life, nor even because his neat little cabin forward was a litter of splinters and broken glass where the potleg had struck, but because he nosed trouble where he thought all was peace and harmony. He had control of some sixteen distinct and separate nations, each isolated and separated from the other by custom and language. They were distinct, not as the French are from the Italian, but as the Slav is from the Turk. In the good old times before the English came there were many wars, tribe against tribe, people against people. There were battles, murders, raidings, and wholesale crucifixions, but the British changed all that. There was peace in the land. Sanders selected with care a long, thin cigar from his case, nibbled at the end and lit it. The prisoner sat on the steel deck of the _Zaire_ near the men's quarters. He was chained by the leg-iron to a staple, and did not seem depressed to any extent. When Sanders made his appearance, a camp stool in his hand, the Commissioner seated himself, and began his inquisition. "How do they call you, my man?" "Bofabi of Isisi." "Who told you to kill me?" "Lord, I forget." "A man or a woman?" "Lord, it may have been either." More than that Sanders could not learn, and the subsequent examination at Isisi taught Sanders nothing, for, when confronted with M'Lino, the man said that he did not know her. Sanders went back to his base in a puzzled frame of mind, and Bofabi of Isisi was sent to the convict establishment at the river's mouth. There matters stood for three months, and all that Sanders learnt of the girl was that she had a new lover whose name was Tebeki, and who was chief of the Akasava. There were three months of peace and calm, and then Tebeki, coveting his neighbour's wife, took three hundred spears down into the Isisi country, burnt the village that sheltered her, crucified her husband, and carried her back with him. In honour of this achievement Tebeki gave a feast and a beer dance. There were great and shameless orgies that lasted five days, and the strip of forest that fringes the river between the Isisi and the lower river became a little inferno.