Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

“ ENVOYS IN COUNCIL
"Hallo, Meredith, I heard rumors that there was a white man up in this part of the bush, but I never guessed it was you. I did think of sending on a runner to see, but somehow I didn't."
"No, you wouldn't," said the older man. "I never knew you make up your mind to anything unless it was decided for you. Now, look here, Slade, we're in lonely country here, and if I shoot you, you'll never be missed; and, by gad, shoot you I will unless you mend your memory."
"Poof! what does it matter? We're the only white men within two hundred miles, and the boys are out of earshot." ”

“ A dozen times Carter thought he saw open water ahead, and pushed on, and a dozen times found himself embayed. And always he had to jot down compass notes with a nail on the well-scored gunwale of the canoe, so as to keep in touch with the raft, and be ready against that forthcoming time when he would have to pilot a steam launch up to Tin Hill. For though he barely expected to escape with life out of this horrible labyrinth of creeks and waterways, be it always understood he intended to return and demand from the country a fortune, if so be he ever got down again to the seaboard. ”

“ He saw also palm-oil puncheons being brought off, and an interest in the work bit him immediately. Here was the commodity which (bar death) would for years to come be his chiefest intimate. Between eclipses of the rollers, he watched every stage of the work—the great white-ended barrels rolled down the glaring beach, naked savages swimming them through the surf with unimaginable skill, a green painted surf-boat at anchor outside the breakers making them fast to a buoyed hawser. ”

“ A man must play the game. But my God! why did I never guess that Kate was on earth somewhere?"
There was an old cotton-wood stump in the clearing, and he stood against it so thoughtful and still that he became the object of attention of bats. He hit at them angrily and recommenced his prowl.
Hour after hour he tramped through the dripping grass, biting against fate. Cascaes, who did not work unless he was driven, had long since checked his tally of kernels, and gone to bed. The factory lamps had one by one gone out. The night noises of the forest that hemmed them in were in full swing. ”

“ They had an alarm that night that the Okky-men were coming. Into the blank silence of sleep there came the roar of a heavy charge of black trade powder as a sentry discharged his dew-filled flintlock. The whites, the Portuguese, and the tired factory boys roused into instant wakefulness. Their nerves were too nicely set to need a second shaking.
Laura met Carter in pyjamas as he was in the act of thumping upon her bedroom door. "Oh, you have got up," he said. "That's good. Well, don't show a light whilst you dress, and keep under shelter. I must just wake Miss O'Neill before I go down." ”

“ In the factories which dot the West African seaboard and rivers, death is such a constant visitor that much of his grimness had faded. At home, in England, or America, or Hamburg, we shiver with apprehension whenever our relative who is "out on the West Coast" comes up into the mind; but the relative himself takes his doses of fever when they fall due with a certain callous philosophy, and on his emergence shattered and shrunken from the attack, congratulates himself on not being a candidate for a gun-case and a top hat that time. ”

“ Already on the M'poso he had seen other puncheons howked on board by a steam-crane which was driven by a one-eared Krooboy.
He had grasped this much of his new trade when sight seemed to grow misty to him, and his body was chilled with an unpleasant perspiration. It is one thing to take one's regular meals on a fine-sized steamboat, whatever weather may befall; it is quite another to do one's voyaging in a leaping, lancing, dancing, wallowing surf-boat. Few men take their first surf-boat ride over a bad roll without being violently seasick, and Carter was no exception to the normal law. ”

“ So now, Miss Slade, just please give me a sample of your best good-bye."
Twilight does not linger in the summer months, even so far north as Grand Canary. The sun was balanced in lurid splendor on the rocky backbone of the isle as Carter said his last words of farewell, making the dead volcanoes look as though at a whim they could spring once more into scarlet life. ”

“ But people who knew her better were very conscious of the fact that Miss Kate O'Neill's eyes only expressed things when she willed that they should do so.
"Do I want to be rich? Well, of course. One can't have things or do things unless one has money. And if I don't get money, no one will for me; or, at least, I'd rather they wouldn't. Of course, you have got Mr. Carter to work for you, Laura; but I am sure, when you put it into cold words, you'd like him to make money, too. You don't want to live all your days on the Coast here, the pair of you. ”

“ George Carter, whose name has been so prominently before the public of late in connection with his splendid efforts in winning over the King of Okky to the side of humanity, has himself been the victim of some very high-handed oppression. He has discovered a most valuable vein of tin in a part of the back country where no European explorer had ever trod before, and with toil and care, and in fact with genius, had brought cargo after cargo of the valuable ore down mysterious African creeks and rivers to a spot where the ocean steamers could conveniently ship it. ”

“ But Carter had got just that dogged drop in him that brings men out to the front, and he proceeded to clean up the launch's meagre tools and her spares, to borrow what others he could from the factory, and then to attack the engines. It was here that the prodigiousness of his job first displayed itself. The brasswork was sound enough—even West Africa could not eat into that—but everything iron was spongy with rust, and he had to set up a forge, and weld and shape afresh, out of any scrap he could find about the factory, each part as he destroyed it. ”

“ Carter shouted exultantly, "it's a quarry! Bring a steamer up alongside here, and every man that works could shovel two hundred sovereigns' worth of ore into her from these dumps each hour without so much as putting a pick in. Why, the outcrops are scarcely leached at all. When we've worked twenty yards or so into the veins I'll rig a temperley transporter and guy it to these rocks above, and run the stuff straight from where it grew into a steamer's holds. Great Christopher! Kate had better look out: I'm not going to let her be the only millionaire on earth." ”

“ Even the dogs found the heat too great for wakefulness, so that only the Englishman carried an open eye. But the smell of the place advertised it as a village of fishers, and a closer scrutiny showed the harvest of the river, gutted, and strung up upon the stripped boughs of trees to dry in the outrageous sun-heat. There are always markets for these dried river fish throughout all West Africa.
Carter backed into thicker cover, and waited till the sun began once more to cast a shadow, and the village woke. First the dogs opened their eyes and began their endless scavengers' prowl. ”

“ He settled himself in the mid thwart of the surf-boat with the water on the floor flowing merrily in and out of his pipe-clayed shoes. Whatever a white man may feel, he always assumes coolness and indifference before the black, and Carter picked up the instinct of his race. ”

“ White-Man's-Trouble, tell me solemnly and truly. Why do noses have bridges? Why, for instance, not ferries? Wake up, you image, and give me a civil answer."
"You lib for dam bad fever," said White-Man's-Trouble still more thoughtfully, "an' if you lib for die, Okky men catch me one-time. So I fit for make you well one-time. Oh, Carter, you hear, I plenty-much fine doctor."
"You a doctor! With peacock's feathers growing out behind your ears instead of whiskers!"
"I savvy nothing white-man's drug-palaver. But I savvy plenty cure fever Krooboy fashion." ”

“ But whether the African be savage bushman or cultivated Moslem gentleman, superstition is part of the very marrow in his backbone. These men had felt the bullets, they had felt the infernal burnings of the benzoline, but they were wound up now to a pitch above dreading either. Orders were given to concentrate in the edge of the bush, as near to the clearing as they could get without being sighted from the factory, and then when all was ready the monkey-skin drums would beat the charge. ”

“ Kate looked up, and Mrs. Craven read something in the girl's face that made her sigh. "You will go your own way, I know, Kitty dear. You are very capable, and very clever, and that has naturally made you very self-reliant. You have shown yourself so wonderfully successful over your business matters that I shouldn't dream of advising you there. But do you ever bring up into mind that there is something more in life than mere financial success?" ”

“ One could not deny that somehow the man had a certain regal dignity about him. "O Carter," he said, "if I have a King's lusts, I have all of a King's gratitude. I was travelling down this river. My canoe was overturned by a snag, and it and the paddlers were swept away down stream, and if the crocodiles have not dealt with the men I will give them their due presently. For myself, I climbed into that tree as you saw, and could not have endured longer. What account was open between us we will wipe from the tally. I owe you for my life now, and I will repay." ”

“ Every day the influx of merchants increased, till at last more came than the staff of the factory could deal with, and they camped outside the fort awaiting their turn to trade. Actually, a small native food market grew there to supply them. Kate had lowered the price the factory paid for every commodity, but still the bush merchants sold, and were only too glad of the chance. Times they felt were troublous; the shadow of the King of Okky hung over the steaming forests, and they wished to get what they could in European produce and be gone. ”

“ But Carter had a poor opinion of the size of his own share if the first of these methods were carried out. To begin with, he knew nothing of company promoting. He would have to employ an expert, who would want the lion's share of the plunder; and indeed he quite realized that a tin mine up an unknown river in the territory of no man's land would take a powerful lot of selling even to that gullible body of mining-share purchasers of the British public. The more he thought over the limited company idea, the less chance of profits did he see in it for himself. And he wanted those profits badly. ”

“ I somehow quite share your instinctive dislike to West Coast Portuguese."
Within ten minutes after reading that letter, Carter was out under a brazen glare of heat, marching along the sand where it was wet and hard, and nearing the straggle of palms which marked the banks of Smooth River, at the rate of four good miles to the hour. When a white man walks at that speed through West Africa mid-day heat, it is only because some question of life or death hangs upon the speed; though in this case Carter told himself that love was the same as life. ”

“ What was he, a factory clerk, to Miss O'Neill? And what, indeed, was Miss O'Neill to him—an engaged man?
The bush rustled back at him: "Laura is—well, what you know. Laura's got a lick of the tar brush. Laura is probably the identical person a certain reverend gentleman in Upper Wharfedale especially warned you against. Laura may pass muster in Grand Canary, but she won't do further North. Fancy Laura in Wharfedale!" Good God, in Wharfedale! Now he came to think of it, he had never talked to Laura about home, and the moors, and the grouse, and the roses. ”

“ He was roused from these dreams with much suddenness. In his up country journeying in Africa he had developed that animal instinct for the nearness of danger which is present in us all, but in nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of the thousand becomes atrophied for want of use. In the river villages the natives had given him a name which means Man-with-eyes-at-the-back-of-his-head.
It was this slightly abnormal sense that sprang into quick activity, and Carter made so sudden a stoop that his face smacked against the shabby cushions on the opposite side of the tartana. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Don't throw any more tins, Trouble. We've saved our bacon, Laura, I do believe, but I hate being unsportsmanlike. It's worse than netting your neighbor's grouse moor, this. But they came up to the gun too quick for me to stop them alone. White-Man's-Trouble, if you throw another of those infernal bombs, I'll slip a shot into you."
Laura was crouched in behind the mattress casemate, her face tucked away into the crook of an elbow, and her shoulders heaving with sobs.
"Hullo, old lady, what's the row with you? You're not hit? Good God, don't tell me you're hit. ”

“ Carter, in his modesty, most emphatically disclaims any such high motives, and avers that he took his now celebrated journey into the bush merely for his own business purposes, and nothing beyond. On this subject we prefer to hold our own opinions. Explorers of his rare type—the almost unknown type that does not advertise—carry with them a modesty that delights in belittling its own triumphs. But even Mr. Carter's modesty cannot explain away certain cold facts. The King of Okky till recently had a most black reputation for human sacrifice. ”

“ The interior of the feteesh was a stew of heat and odors, and the white man's elaborate calculations were none of the most glib. To knock some idea of the fairness of these into the black man's skull was a work that required not only eloquence, but also athletic power. The simple savage who did only one day's shopping per annum was willing always to let the delights of it linger out as long as possible, and all the white man's hustling could not drive the business along at more than a snail's pace. ”