"Choose, then. Which of us would you like to work for?"

"You!" he answered promptly, pointing at Fred.

It was on the tip of the tongue of every one of us to ask him instantly
why, but that would have been too rank indiscretion. It never pays to
seem curious about a native's personal reasons, and it was many weeks
before we knew why he had made up his mind in advance to choose Fred
and not either of us for his master.

His choice made, and the offer of his services accepted, he took over
Fred forthwith--demanded his keys--found out which our room was--went
over our belongings and transferred the best of our things into Fred's
bag and the worst of his into ours--remade Fred's bed after a
mysterious fashion of his own, taking one of my new blankets and one of
Will's in exchange for Fred's old ones--cleaned Fred's guns thoroughly
after carefully abstracting the oil and waste from our gun-cases and
transferring them to Fred's--removed the laces from my shooting boots
and replaced them with Fred's knotted ones--sharpened Fred's razors and
shaved himself with mine (to the enduring destruction of its once
artistic edge)--and departed in the direction of the bazaar.

He returned at the end of an hour and a half with a motley following of
about twenty, arrayed in blankets of every imaginable faded hue and in
every stage of dirtiness.

"You wanting cook," he announced. "These three making cook."

He waved three nondescripts to the front, and we chose a tall Swahili
because he grinned better than the others. "Although," as Fred
remarked, "what the devil grinning has to do with cooking is more than
anybody knows." The man, whose name was Juma, turned out to be an
execrable cook, but as he never left off grinning under any
circumstances (and it would have been impossible to imagine
circumstances worse than those we warred with later on) we never had
the heart to dismiss him.

After that, Will and I selected a servant apiece who were destined
forever to wage war on Kazimoto in hopeless efforts to prevent his
giving Fred the best end of everything. Mine was a Baganda who called
himself Matches, presumably because his real name was unpronounceable.
Will chose a Malindi boy named Tengeneza (and that means arrange in
order, fix, make over, manage, mend--no end of an ominous name!). They
were both outclassed from the start by Kazimoto, but to add to the
handicap he insisted that since he was a headman he would need some