ut Hatteras' face, and dissolved into
flies. The Kru boys found Hatteras in a dead swoon on the floor
half-an-hour later, and next day, of course, he was down with the
fever. The agent had died of it three days before.

Hatteras recovered from the fever, but not from the impression. It
left him with a prevailing sense of horror and, at first, with a sense
of disgust too. "It's a damned obscene country," he would say. But he
stayed in it, for he had no choice. All the money which he could save
went to the support of his family, and for six years the firm he
served moved him from district to district, from factory to factory.

Now the second item in the stock in trade was a gift of tongues and
about this time it began to bring him profit. Wherever Hatteras was
posted, he managed to pick up a native dialect and with the dialect
inevitably a knowledge of native customs. Dialects are numerous on the
west coast, and at the end of six years, Hatteras could speak as many
of them as some traders could enumerate. Languages ran in his blood;
because he acquired a reputation for knowledge and was offered service
under the Niger Protectorate, so that when two years later, Walker
came out to Africa to open a new branch factory at a settlement on the
Bonny river, he found Hatteras stationed in command there.

Hatteras, in fact, went down to Bonny river town to meet the steamer
which brought his friend.

"I say, Dick, you look bad," said Walker.

"People aren't, as a rule, offensively robust about these parts."

"I know that; but your the weariest bag of bones I've ever seen."

"Well, look at yourself in a glass a year from now for my double,"
said Hatteras, and the pair went up river together.

"Your factory's next to the Residency," said Hatteras. "There's a
compound to each running down to the river, and there's a palisade
between the compounds. I've cut a little gate in the palisade as it
will shorten the way from one house to the other."

The wicket gate was frequently used during the next few
months--indeed, more frequently than Walker imagined. He was only
aware that, when they were both at home, Hatteras would come through
it of an evening and smoke on his verandah. Then he would sit
for hours cursing the country, raving about the lights in
Piccadilly-circus, and offering his immortal soul in exchange for a
comic-opera tune played upon a barrel-organ. Walker possessed a big
atlas, and one of Hatteras' chief diversions