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He did not mince matters in the very least; he did not try and ingratiate himself with any body; but he took each diner in turn, from Forbes, the Colonial Secretary, to Charteris and Baines, mere traders and members of Council, and in sulted each over his particular share of the Colony's work, with deliberation and system. He was a man with a good clear voice, and none of his words miscarried; and when he selected a victim, all the other men at the table listened with respectful attention. The Colony, for the future, it seemed, was to be run on entirely differ ent lines: trade and the glorification of the Em pire were to be things of the past; and in the meantime he was going up to call in person on the King of Katti to present him with a new creed and, apparently, a bale of second-hand trousers.

The men round the table, old Coasters all of them, with the one exception of Philipps, solemnly and emphatically warned him of the dangers which lay beyond the narrow fringe of the Colony; and, as offensively as might be, he rejected all their advice. Nobody resented the contradiction; nobody showed up the silliness of his shallow, ignorant, sledge-hammer arguments. That was a great night for the Rev. Alfred Pad gett, and he mopped at his wet face and made the most of it. When the hour came to go and he sat consumedly long they were all still waiting and watching, and each man came for ward in his turn and shook hands with him, in a manner that made the parting scene almost like a religious rite.

But at last he went away out of the hot glare of the room into the warm night outside, and the men got into long chairs and took deep breaths as if a big restraint was taken from them.

For long enough there was silence. Each had his own thoughts to add up and value, and the lazy punkah eddied the tobacco smoke overhead.

Then Baines said: " By God, he is brave enough. When I told him what Katti City was really like, he never turned a hair. I watched the beggar."

"Pah! Brave?" said Forbes. " It was only mutton-headed ignorance. Simply, he didn't believe you."

"Think so?" said Baines. " Perhaps you're right. He certainly doesn't take any of us much at our own valuation here. Well, he'll find out many things for himself in due time, and after that the wires '11 begin to work, and the nice pink English Tommies will begin to come, and the West African squadron Good Lord! that gives me jumps."

His Excellency the Governor had accidentally tipped over a tall soda-water tumbler, which fell with a crash on to the floor. The men in the room, with their nerves all on springs, started as if a shell had burst under the table, and by the time they had settled down again, frowning and fanning, the Governor had finished apologising for his clumsiness, and had started a talk on the new pier which it was proposed to erect to supersede the dangerous surf-boats. His Excel lency might not be a brainy man, but even his enemies could not help admitting his infinite tactfulness. He did all his most delicate business round a dinner-table, and yet he was never known to let a dinner conversation grow dangerous. There have not been many public servants of whom this could be written on their official tombstones.

If Padgett expected a final ovation the next morning before he set off into the bush, he was disappointed. He started soon after daybreak. It is in the cool of daybreak that the West Afri can white man begins his work. But on this occasion every one seemed most unnaturally to have overslept himself.

Mr. Padgett stepped out in full panoply of pith helmet, white clothes, and umbrella, with a fine caravan of carriers before and behind; but no one of a higher species than laughing, chattering natives filled the street between the factories and the grass-roofed dwelling-houses. Not a single member of the white population had come to see him off, which, taking into consideration the occasion and the place, was an obvious per sonal slight. But Mr. Padgett did not mind that. On the contrary, he rather preferred it. He was one of those men who make a luxury of the minor martyrdoms.

The ease with which he collected his caravan of carriers, seemed to him a proof that the solemn warnings which the whites of the Colony had given him about the dangers of the Katti country were merely a pack of lies, intended to keep him from finding out how matters really lay. It did not occur to him that when the white man leads, the West Coast native, being a childlike and some what brainless creature, will always follow and carry for pay. And so, cheered by his bigoted ignorance, he strutted complacently enough through the trim streets of the Coast town (which made up his sole personal acquaintance with Africa) and disappeared down a narrow eighteen-inch road which corkscrewed its way into the bush beyond.

There are no electric telegraphs up-country in Africa, but in some mysterious manner news floats about amongst the natives of what is going on, and its transmission is astonishingly rapid. Comment on the progress of Padgett's expedition drifted into the factories from almost every one of its halting-places, and the white men of the Colony's capital conned over the scraps they heard with tingling nerves. In the temperate climate of England it is hard work to sit entirely still whilst one is waiting for an almost certain catastrophe, but in the unhealthy stew of a West Coast town, where one's health is chronically in rags, the suspense of such a vigil can very well approach nearly to the unendurable. But the machinery of Government and business cannot stop because its drivers are oppressed by megrims such as these, and the white men in the white clothes, with their faces yellowed by liver and violent suns, plied on doggedly at their tasks as heretofore. Latins, or men of the more emotional nations, would have halted listlessly during that wait; and as a consequence they and their kind do not now make empires. The Anglo-Saxon is a different type of animal. He may have less emotions, but nothing short of his own funeral makes him neglect his appointed work for very long together.

As a visible result, they were rather apt during this time of suspense to brace up their dinner champagne with angostura bitters, and to get hold of a few more than the customary cocktails between whiles; but they kept themselves well in hand, and, in fact, rather took on a guardedness of speech that was foreign to them. There was a hysterical native press in the Colony's capital, which at times got quoted in the London papers; and it would not do to let the idea leak out into print that they foresaw the good the forthcoming catastrophe would do, before that catastrophe took place.

At last, however, the thundercloud broke, and the tired white men breathed deep and prepared for the deluge. The King of Katti was no nig gling savage. Reports came down from his gory capital thick and fast. He had sent an armed force to meet the invader, whose carriers promptly fled and small blame to them! The wretched Padgett first tried to run, and then, as explanations were beyond him, pluckily started to fight. Accounts of the skirmish varied, as native ac counts will: some tales credited him with terrific slaughter; whilst others held that he had merely laid about him with a walking-cane; but all agreed upon his capture and subsequent execution. Indeed the King of Katti, to remove all doubt, sent down a week later a shrivelled hand and arm, purporting to be Padgett's, as a sign of his contempt for the white man's power, and as a hint to deter future callers.

But by this time the home cable had got the news well in hand, and the sweating operators were working double shifts, whilst men in twenty offices over half the world arranged for the bringing together and the furnishing of an army. And a little later the English papers flashed out one morning, black with indignation and head lines, and asked how long a feeble English Gov ernment was going to permit missionaries of the sacred English race to be foully murdered by African barbarians. There was no talk now of the high-minded native lord; there was no talk of offending French or German susceptibilities. The good people at home had not been stewing over the catastrophe for a month before it hap pened, and the reasons for it all they would not have understood even if these had been explained to them. The news to London and England was as fresh as it was horrible, and the clamour for vengeance dinned from every side. From the slaying of this one white missionary, Britain in stantly knew that the hinterland to this Colony was not fit to govern itself, and it shouted forth the order to annex without further thought.

The project as Coasters wearily knew was not a novel one, but hitherto it had been kept in the background by a sturdy opposition. Now, however, the opposition vanished. Even woodenheaded Little Eri glanders and their adherents know when to be silent sometimes.

The British public says in its commanding way, " Do this!" and is accustomed to see it done. It chooses its servants well, and they are always smart to carry out the details. Forbes, Dayton-Philipps, His Excellency the Governor, and the other men on the spot, with the eye of prophecy had secured a month's start, and natu rally had got a wealth of preparations mapped out up the sleeve. When these were reeled forth in rhythmical precision, they spoke vol umes (to the public) of the excellence of the Colony's organisation; and the hurrying warcorrespondent, catching this key-note before he sailed, saw the perfection of the local machinery from the moment a surf-boat ejected him on the beach, and patted the white men of the place on the back in lavish dispatches. Clearly this Colony had been too long neglected. Clearly the men now in charge were just the fellows to bring it with a rush to the front.

At the London War Office, officers were tum bling over one another in their eagerness to volunteer; at Malta, Cape Town, Woolwich, Gibraltar, pieces of the war machine were get ting oiled and started; a wire to Suez sent a home-coming Indian regiment to stew some more in the tropics before it could swill its English beer; and in Free Town harbour, Sierra Leone, Her Majesty's penny steamer Alecto took on a hurried lick of paint as she prepared for her four-hundredth campaign. Nobody knew how strong were the forces of the King of Katti, and nobody, except a few responsible heads, very vastly cared. Dayton-Philipps prayed piously that they wouldn't "swamp the show with regiments."

"The old Lord High Executioner up at Katti," said he to Forbes, "has got some good fighting soldiers with excellent guns, so my fellows say, and it will be a beastly shame if they are scared into running away before the fun begins."

"Well, we want the man beaten once and for always," said the Colonial Secretary, who looked more to effect than method. " We've more luck than I hoped for: the Colony isn't having to pay for the troops; we've been such good boys that we're having 'em stood for a treat; and they can send the whole bally army for anything I care."

"And make a silly picnic of it? I didn't come out here for picnics; I came for promotion; and if it's all Tommies and no fighting, that means I've to stay where I am. Look here, you let me waltz in with the Hausas call it a reconnaissance in force, if you like and I'll clean out Katti's town for you before the other fellows arrive. I say, I could really. Do try and work it with the Chief, there's a good fellow."

"Rot!" said Forbes. "This war isn't going to be run for your particular benefit, my young friend or mine, for that matter. It's for the Colony. It '11 bring the Colony into notice, and let everybody know what a fine place it is, and how well it's run by us, of course and how much more valuable it's got by having the new territory added, and, in fact, what a desirable Colony it is for younger sons and capitalists in every way."

"Oh, if you look upon the war as a beastly advertisement scheme!"

"I do. This is the way it runs: ' To let, New portion of the British Empire, offering a highly desirable dumping-ground for single young men desirous of making a pile. Apply early for allotments.' And when the guns begin to shoot, everybody at home will turn round and see that advertisement written big in the newspapers and on the hoardings. The more guns there are, and the more they shoot, the more those excellent people will turn round to look, and become aware of the Colony's existence."

"How mad that poor beggar Padgett would be," said Philipps, " if he could only know what his blundering expedition had led up to! If he had been a German, he could not have hated any more the idea that this Colony should expand or any way go forward."

The Colonial Secretary turned on him with sudden asperity.

"Now look here," he said, " mind how you talk about Padgett. There are a lot of reporters on the beach here now, and if they get to know too much, the fat '11 be in the fire with a vengeance. Reporters are all very well in their way; they're fellows we've wanted out here badly for long enough. But it is only intended they should know the proper things. All the white men in this Colony are safe enough as far as intention goes, because they know, whoever they are, that if the Colony pushes ahead, they move on also. But the man that scares me is your loose-lipped man."

Dayton-Philipps flushed.

"I am not altogether a dam' fool," he said. "The whole business mystified me at first, I'll own. You were all so infernally close about it. But I began to see that the Chief wouldn't have a bounder like that to come and insult him day after day at Government House without a considerable reason, and after I sat down to think the matter out, I wasn't very long in seeing how Padgett would be of use. You see, I'm a bit of a fisher man myself, and when you can't rise 'em with a fly, live bait's usually the best thing, if you're fishing for the pot. But you needn't necessarily think I was the kind of fathead to go and bawl out the whole yarn to one of those correspondent fellows when he came into barracks for a cocktail.

I'm not long enough out from home myself to forget how they look at things there."

"All right," said Forbes; " I didn't mean to draw you like that, only I thought a hint might be useful. Well, I must go down to the office again. My faith, though, this kind of tea-party does mean a mountain of work for the men on the spot. I wish I could think there was a chance of it bringing in something in the way of reward besides."

Now, it is no place here to reprint what the war-correspondents with the Expeditionary Force wrote of with such breadth of colour and detail. The converging troops, with their paraphernalia of guns, rockets, commissariat, ambulance, and all the rest, steamed out to the Colony from a dozen points, in war-ship and hired transport. Every dwelling in the town was a barrack, and Government House was an officers' free restaurant. The men on the spot who knew the country, suddenly changed from exiles into residents, and Dayton- Philipps, with little thrills of glee, found himself giving advice to an admiral, three colonels, and a general, who had already won high place in the traffic of war.