ng crates, or descended into places sinister like cellars. We got
in, we drove on, we got out again for the sole purpose, as it seemed, of
looking behind a heap of rubble. The sun declined; my companion was curt
and sardonic in his answers, but it appears we were just missing Johnson
all along. At last our conveyance stopped once more with a jerk, and the
driver jumping down opened the door.

A black mudhole blocked the lane. A mound of garbage crowned with the
dead body of a dog arrested us not. An empty Australian beef tin bounded
cheerily before the toe of my boot. Suddenly we clambered through a gap
in a prickly fence....

It was a very clean native compound: and the big native woman, with bare
brown legs as thick as bedposts, pursuing on all fours a silver dollar
that came rolling out from somewhere, was Mrs. Johnson herself. "Your
man's at home," said the ex-sergeant, and stepped aside in complete
and marked indifference to anything that might follow. Johnson--at
home--stood with his back to a native house built on posts and with its
walls made of mats. In his left hand he held a banana. Out of the right
he dealt another dollar into space. The woman captured this one on the
wing, and there and then plumped down on the ground to look at us with
greater comfort.

My man was sallow of face, grizzled, unshaven, muddy on elbows and
back; where the seams of his serge coat yawned you could see his white
nakedness. The vestiges of a paper collar encircled his neck. He looked
at us with a grave, swaying surprise. "Where do you come from?" he
asked. My heart sank. How could I have been stupid enough to waste
energy and time for this?

But having already gone so far I approached a little nearer and declared
the purpose of my visit. He would have to come at once with me, sleep on
board my ship, and to-morrow, with the first of the ebb, he would give
me his assistance in getting my ship down to the sea, without steam. A
six-hundred-ton barque, drawing nine feet aft. I proposed to give
him eighteen dollars for his local knowledge; and all the time I was
speaking he kept on considering attentively the various aspects of the
banana, holding first one side up to his eye, then the other.

"You've forgotten to apologise," he said at last with extreme precision.
"Not being a gentleman yourself, you don't know apparently when you
intrude upon a gentleman. I am one. I wish you to understand that when I
am in funds I don't work, an