Near Gondokoro, at St. Croix, Gordon came to the ruins of an Austrian missionary settlement. Only a few banana trees, planted by the missionaries, and some graves, marked where the Christian settlement had been. Out of twenty missionaries who had gone there during thirteen years, thirteen had died of fever, two of dysentery, and two, broken in health, had had to go home. And yet they had not been able to claim as a Christian even one of the blacks amongst whom they worked. No wonder that the Austrian Government lost heart and gave up the mission. When Gordon reached Gondokoro he saw that it was absurd to pretend that the Khedive ruled any of the country outside its walls. No one dared go half a mile outside without being in danger of his life from the tribes whose wives and children and cattle the slavers had taken. Gordon felt that to make friends with those people, to show them that he was sorry for them, and that he wished to help them, was the first thing to be done if he was to be in reality their Governor. And so, as he travelled on from point to point--back to Khartoum from Gondokoro, to Berber, to Fashoda, to Soubat--he made friends wherever he went. Quickly the black people came to love the man who punished or slew their enemies, who took them from the slavers, and gave them back their wives and children and cattle. He gave grain to some, set others to plant maize, fed the starving ones, and always paid them for each piece of work that they did for him. Sometimes, even, he would buy from them the children that they were too poor to feed, and find good homes for them. One man sold him his two boys of twelve and eight for a basket of dhoora (a kind of grain). He soon found that the blacks did not look on the sale of human beings in the same way that he did. [Illustration: In the Soudan buying two children for a basketful of dhoora] One man stole a cow, and when the owner found out the thief and came to claim his cow, it was too late. The cow had been eaten. Next day Gordon passed the man's hut, and saw that one of his two children was gone. "Where was the other?" he asked of the mother. "Oh, it had been given to the man from whom the cow had been stolen," she replied with a happy smile. "But," said Gordon, "are you not sorry?" "Oh no! we would rather have the cow." "But you have eaten the cow, and the pleasure is over," said Gordon. "Oh, but, all the same, we would sooner have the cow!" Two little boys came smiling up to Gordon one day, and pressed him to buy one of them for a little basketful of dhoora. Gordon bought one, and both boys were delighted.