, Everett analyzed his conduct of the night previous.
"At home," he told Upsher, "I would have been telephoning for an
ambulance, or been out in the street giving the man the 'first-aid'
drill. But living as we do here, so close to death, we see things more
clearly. Death loses its importance. It's a bromide," he added. "But
travel certainly broadens one. Every day I have been in the Congo, I
have been assimilating new ideas." Upsher nodded vigorously in assent.
An older man could have told Everett that he was assimilating just as
much of the Congo as the rabbit assimilates of the boa-constrictor, that
first smothers it with saliva and then swallows it.

Everett started up the Congo in a small steamer open on all sides to
the sun and rain, and with a paddle-wheel astern that kicked her forward
at the rate of four miles an hour. Once every day, the boat tied up to a
tree and took on wood to feed her furnace, and Everett talked to the
white man in charge of the wood post, or, if, as it generally happened,
the white man was on his back with fever, dosed him with quinine. On
board, except for her captain, and a Finn who acted as engineer, Everett
was the only other white man. The black crew and "wood-boys" he soon
disliked intensely. At first, when Nansen, the Danish captain, and the
Finn struck them, because they were in the way, or because they were
not, Everett winced, and made a note of it. But later he decided the
blacks were insolent, sullen, ungrateful; that a blow did them no harm.

According to the unprejudiced testimony of those who, before the war, in
his own country, had owned slaves, those of the "Southland" were always
content, always happy. When not singing close harmony in the
cotton-fields, they danced upon the levee, they twanged the old banjo.
But these slaves of the Upper Congo were not happy. They did not dance.
They did not sing. At times their eyes, dull, gloomy, despairing,
lighted with a sudden sombre fire, and searched the eyes of the white
man. They seemed to beg of him the answer to a terrible question. It was
always the same question. It had been asked of Pharaoh. They asked it of
Leopold. For hours, squatting on the iron deck-plates, humped on their
naked haunches, crowding close together, they muttered apparently
interminable criticisms of Everett. Their eyes never left him. He
resented this unceasing scrutiny. It got upon his nerves. He was sure
they were evolving some scheme to rob him of hi