ded, and only twenty-five fit for duty, and yet the Egyptian
Government continued to send them instead of the black troops Gordon
asked for.

From Gondokoro, Gordon moved to Rageef, and there built a station on
healthier ground, higher up from the marshes. He sent to Gondokoro for
ammunition for his mountain howitzer, and the commandant there thought
it a good chance to pawn off on him some that was so damp as to be
useless. With ten men and no ammunition, his Arab allies left him in a
place where no Arab would have stayed without 100 well-armed men.

Gordon's German servant, and two little black boys that Gordon had
bought, followed in a small boat to Rageef with Gordon's baggage.

The German came to Gordon with very grave face.

"I have had a great loss," said he. Gordon at once thought that one of
the boys must have been drowned.

"What?" he anxiously asked.

"I saw a hippopotamus on the bank," said the man, "and fired at him
with your big rifle; and I did not know it would kick so hard, and it
kicked me over, and it fell into the water."

Said Gordon, "You are a born idiot of three years old! How dare you
touch my rifle?"

But the rifle was gone, and he had to smile as the little black boys
mimicked the German's fright when he dropped the rifle and laughed in
scorn at him.

At Rageef, seeing he need expect no real help from the Egyptian
Government, Gordon began to form an army of his own, making soldiers of
the Soudanese,--the "Gippies," as our own soldiers now call them. And
the Gippies are as brave and soldier-like a body of troops as is to be
found. "We," they say, "are like the English; we are not afraid." He
enlisted men who had been slaves, and men who had been slavers. A
detachment of cannibals that he came across he also enlisted, drilled,
and trained, and turned into first-rate soldiers.

The slavers grew afraid of Gordon Pasha, and of the army that he had
made.

Where an Egyptian official would not have dared to go without a convoy
of 100 soldiers, and where a single soldier would have been sure to
have been waylaid and murdered, Gordon could now go in safety, alone
and unarmed. He would walk along the river banks for miles and miles,
only armed when he wished to shoot a hippopotamus.

Gordon's work was always much varied. Always, each bit of it was done
with all his might.

He drilled savages, shot hippopotamuses, mended watches and musical
boxes for black chiefs, patched his ow