e-bar made fast to the leg of each for sinker, an' dem was
my dead loss-a too. I don' get paid for fire-bars given to _gastados_--"
His English failed him. He shrugged his shoulders, and said "Sabbey?"

"Sabbey plenty," said Nilssen. "Just get me a leadsman to work, Captain.
If you're in a hurry, I'll skim the banks as close as I dare."

Rabeira called away a hand to heave the lead, and sent a steward for a
bottle of wine and glasses. He even offered camp stools, which,
naturally, the pilots did not use. In fact, he brimmed with affableness
and hospitality.

From the first moment of his stepping on to the bridge, Kettle began to
learn the details of his new craft. As each sandbar showed up beneath
the yellow ripples, as each new point of the forest-clad banks opened
out, Nilssen gave him courses and cross bearings, dazing enough to the
unprofessional ear, but easily stored in a trained seaman's brain. He
discoursed in easy slang of the cut-offs, the currents, the
sludge-shallows, the floods, and the other vagaries of the great river's
course, and punctuated his discourse with draughts of Rabeira's wine,
and comments on the tangled mass of black humanity under the
forecastle-head awning.

"There's something wrong with those passenger boys," he kept on
repeating. And another time: "Guess those niggers yonder are half mad
with funk about something."

But Rabeira was always quick to reassure him. "Now dey lib for Congo,
dey not like the idea of soldier-palaver. Dere was nothing more the
matter with them but leetle sickness."

"Oh! it's recruits for the State Army you're bringing, is it?" asked
Kettle.

"If you please," said Rabeira cheerfully. "Slaves is what you English
would call dem. Laborers is what dey call demselves."

Nilssen looked anxiously at his new assistant. Would he have any foolish
English sentiment against slavery, and make a fuss? Nilssen, being a man
of peace, sincerely hoped not. But as it was, Captain Kettle preserved a
grim silence. He had met the low-caste African negro before, and knew
that it required a certain amount of coercion to extract work from him.
But he did notice that all the Portuguese on board were armed like
pirates, and were constantly on the _qui vive_, and judged that there
was a species of coercion on this vessel which would stick at
very little.

The reaches of the great beer-colored river opened out before them one
after another in endless vistas, and at rare places the