akingly picking each word,
"what you call 'atrocities' are customs of warfare, forms of punishment.
When they go to war they _expect_ to be tortured; they _know_, if
they're killed, they'll be eaten. The white man comes here and finds
these customs have existed for centuries. He adopts them, because--"

"One moment!" interrupted Everett warmly. "That does not excuse _him_.
The point is, that with him they have _not_ existed. To him they should
be against his conscience, indecent, horrible! He has a greater
knowledge, a much higher intelligence; he should lift the native, not
sink to him."

The Coaster took his pipe from his mouth, and twice opened his lips to
speak. Finally, he blew the smoke into the air, and shook his head.

"What's the use!" he exclaimed.

"Try," laughed Everett. "Maybe I'm not as unintelligent as I talk."

"You must get this right," protested the Coaster. "It doesn't matter a
damn what a man _brings_ here, what his training _was_, what _he is_.
The thing is too strong for him."

"What thing?"

"That!" said the Coaster. He threw out his arm at the brooding
mountains, the dark lagoons, the glaring coast-line against which the
waves shot into the air with the shock and roar of twelve-inch guns.

"The first white man came to Sierra Leone five hundred years before
Christ," said the Coaster. "And, in twenty-two hundred years, he's got
just twenty miles inland. The native didn't need forts, or a navy, to
stop him. He had three allies: those waves, the fever, and the sun.
Especially the sun. The black man goes bare-headed, and the sun lets him
pass. The white man covers his head with an inch of cork, and the sun
strikes through it and kills him. When Jameson came down the river from
Yambuya, the natives fired on his boat. He waved his helmet at them for
three minutes, to show them there was a white man in the canoe. Three
minutes was all the sun wanted. Jameson died in two days. Where you are
going, the sun does worse things to a man than kill him: it drives him
mad. It keeps the fear of death in his heart; and _that_ takes away his
nerve and his sense of proportion. He flies into murderous fits, over
silly, imaginary slights; he grows morbid, suspicious, he becomes a
coward, and because he is a coward with authority, he becomes a bully.

"He is alone, we will suppose, at a station three hundred miles from any
other white man. One morning his house-boy spills a cup of coffee on
him, and in a rage