but she was happy, like all busy people who love
their work and are doing good.

[Illustration: THE LANDING BEACH AT EKENGE.]

CHAPTER III

Ma's great adventure: how she went up-river by herself in a
canoe and lived in a forest amongst a savage tribe; how she
fought their terrible customs and saved many lives; how she
built a hut for herself and then a church, and how she took a
band of the wild warriors down to the coast and got them to be
friends with the people who had always been their sworn enemies.

Ma felt that she was not getting to the heart of things.

Behind that wall of bush, for hundreds of miles inland, lay a vast
region of forest and river into which white men had not yet ventured. It
was there that the natives lived almost like wild beasts, and where the
most terrible crimes against women and children were done without any
one lifting a finger to stop them. It was there that the biggest work
for Jesus was to be carried on. "If only I could get amongst these
people," she said, "and attack their customs at the root; that is where
they must be destroyed."

She dreamed of it night and day, and laid her plans.

One district lying between two rivers behind Creek Town, called Okoyong,
was specially noted for its lawless heathenism. The tribe who lived
there was strong, proud, warlike, and had become the terror of the whole
country. Every man, woman, and child of them went about armed, and even
ate and slept with their guns and swords by their side; they roamed
about in bands watching the forest paths, and attacked and captured all
whom they met, and sold them as slaves or sent them away to be food for
the cannibals. They and the people of the coast were sworn enemies.

Ma knew all about them, and was eager to go into their midst to teach
them better ways. She pled with the Mission leaders at Duke Town. "I am
not afraid," she said; "I am alone now and have nobody to be anxious
about me."

But the missionaries shook their heads. "No, no, it is too dangerous,"
they told her.

And her friends the traders said, "It is a gun-boat they want, Ma, not a
missionary."

It was hard for her eager spirit to wait. For fourteen years she had
worked in the factory at Dundee, for ten more she had toiled in the
towns on the Calabar River, and she was now a grown woman. But God often
keeps us at a task far longer than we ourselves think is good for us,
for He knows best, and if we are