omised the head-man to shoot him most
punctually if any one went over the side who was not a pukka corpse, and
if niggers were addicted to gratitude (which they are not), there are
gentlemen now living on the Kroos coast who might remember me
favourably. For we did get in. A B. and A. boat picked us up three weary
days later, and towed us at the end of an extremely long hawser into the
very place to which I wanted to go.

Of course Fernando Po, being Spanish, kept us very much at arm's length;
and we did a thirty days' most rigid quarantine, which made (after the
last case had recovered) a matter of forty days in all. But we had no
more deaths, and the bishop pulled up into fine form. He was not a man
that I could ever bring myself to like, and as Tordoff was for the most
part sullen and unwishful for talk, the time that we swung to our anchor
off Port Clarence was not exhilarating.

Still it was pleasant to think that one was alive, and to realise that
one had got respectably out of a very tight corner--yes, one of the
tightest. The tramp's two boats never turned up again. I suppose they
carried cholera away with them, and drifted about in the belt of
equatorial calms, full of sun-dried corpses, till some tornado came and
swamped them. So that we three were the only Europeans left out of
thirty-four, and of the two hundred and thirty negroes who left Banana
in the Congo, only seventy-four came to Fernando Po. It was a tolerable
thinning out, but when it came to climbing the peak, that made up for
all which had gone before. Indeed it is a wonderful mountain.

I saw Tordoff again just as I was going away from the island, and tried
to put it to him delicately that I was not badly off, and would like to
give him a lift if the thing could be managed.

"No, Mr. Calvert," he said, "thanks. I prefer to go to the devil my own
gait. I don't suppose you'd ever know who I am; but if anybody describes
me and asks, just say you haven't seen me."

[Illustration: "'THERE ISN'T A REDDER FOOL THAN ME IN BOTH ATLANTICS.'"]

And that is the last I have seen or heard of him. It is extraordinary
how one drifts away from men. But, on the other hand, I should not be in
the least surprised at stumbling across Tordoff again, in purple and
fine linen for choice on the next occasion.

[Illustration]

IN A DISAPPEARING CHESHIRE TOWN.

THE STRANGE STORY OF NORTHWICH.

BY PERCY L. PARKER.

The town of Northwich is subject to fit