ali, they are bent on risking it," he
begins, throwing himself upon a rug and proceeding to fill a pipe.

"Are they? I'm not altogether glad, yet if it tends towards hurrying us
out of this butchery line of business I'm not altogether sorry. I think
I hate it more and more every day."

"It isn't a bad line of business, Holmes," returns Hazon, completely
ignoring the smothered reproachfulness, resentment even, underlying the
tone and reply. "Come, now, you've made a goodish bit of money the short
time you have been at it. Anyhow, I want to know in what other you would
have made anything like as much in the time. Not in fooling with those
rotten swindling stocks at the Rand, for instance?"

"Maybe not. But we haven't realized yet. In other words, we are not safe
out of the wood yet, Hazon, and so it's too soon to hulloa. I don't
believe we are going to get off so easily," he adds.

"Are you going to get on your croaking horse again, and threaten us with
'judgments' and 'curses,' and all that sort of thing?" rejoins the
other, with a good-humoured laugh. "Why, man, we are
philanthropists--real philanthropists. And I never heard of 'judgments'
and 'curses' being showered upon such."

"Philanthropists, are we? That's a good idea. But where, by the way,
does the philanthropy come in?"

"Why, just here." Then, impressively, "Listen, now, Holmes. Carry your
mind back to all the sights you have seen since we came up the Lualaba
until now. Have you forgotten that round dozen of niggers we happened
on, buried in the ground up to their necks, and when we had dug up one
fellow we found we had taken a lot of trouble for nothing because he'd
got his arms and legs broken. The same held good of all the others,
except that some were mutilated as well. You remember how sick it made
you coming upon those heads in the half darkness; or those quarters of
a human body swinging from branches, to which their owner had been
spliced so that, in springing back, the boughs should drag him asunder,
as in fact they did? Or the sight of people feeding on the flesh of
their own blood relations, and many and many another spectacle no more
amusing? Well, then, these barbarities were practised by no wicked
slave-raiders, mind, but by the 'quiet, harmless' people upon each
other. And they are of every-day occurrence. Well, then, in capturing
these gentle souls, and deporting them--for a price--whither they will
perforce be taught better manners, we a