hat he was always willing to listen to their
troubles, always ready to help them. In the first three days of his
governorship he gave away over L1000 of his own money to the hungry
poor.

Great chiefs, as well as poor people, came to see him and became his
friends. If one of them sat too long, Gordon would rise and say in
English: "Now, old bird, it is time for you to go," and the chief would
go away, delighted with the Governor's affability and politeness.
Those who begged, and continued to beg for things he could not grant,
knew a different Governor.

"Never!" he would shout in an angry voice. "Do you understand? Have
you finished?" and they would hurry off, frightened at his flashing
eyes.

When fighting was necessary, he led his men as he had led his Chinese
troops in past days. Like Nelson, he did not know the meaning of the
word "fear."

News came to him that the son of Sebehr, king of the slavers, with 6000
men, was about to attack a poor, weak little garrison that they could
have wiped out with the greatest ease. At once Gordon mounted his
camel, and, alone and unarmed, sped off across the desert, covering 85
miles in a day and a half. On the way he rode into a swarm of flies
that thickly covered him and his camel. Of his arrival at the little
garrison he wrote to his sister: "I came on my people like a
thunderbolt. . . . Imagine to yourself a single, dirty, red-faced man
on a camel, ornamented with flies, arriving in the divan all of a
sudden. They were paralysed, and could not believe their eyes."

Still more paralysed were the slavers when, at dawn next morning, there
rode into their camp Gordon Pasha, radiant in the gorgeous "golden
armour" the Khedive had given him. Fearlessly and scornfully Gordon
condemned them, and ordered them at once to lay down their arms. They
listened in silence and wonderment, and then weakly submitted to this
great Pasha who knew no fear.

[Illustration: There rode into their camp Gordon Pasha]

When the slavers' power had been broken and their dens harried out--not
without some heavy fighting--Gordon went on a mission from the Khedive
to the King of Abyssinia, one of the cruellest and most savage of cruel
kings. The Khedive wanted peace, but the Abyssinian King would not
have it, and treated Gordon with the greatest insolence.

"Do you know that I could kill you?" he asked, glaring at Gordon like a
tiger. Gordon answered that he was quite ready to die, and