第 23 页

"I didn't know all this. Who would have guessed that young blackguard to be half such a good fellow? Kiddie dear, if I were in your shoes, I should love the ruffian myself."

The Kid gave my arm a squeeze, and went on:

"Find him for me, Mac find him, and bring him back to England and to what's his. I can't get trace of him myself, though I sent a man out to the Cape two years back, and kept him there till he had looked in the face of every English man in Southern Africa; and yet I know that he is alive somewhere I am sure of it. I can't tell you why, but I am sure."

"Right you are, Kiddie: the Youngun is alive, or was a month back."

She turned upon me almost fiercely.

"Mac! Mac! I haven't deserved this! Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because, my dear Kid, I didn't know whether it was good that you should be enlightened. The Youngun, as he at present stands, is not a desir able object to bring back to England and poverty. Your man didn't find him at the Cape, because he wasn't there. He went on to Florida, orangegrowing. A full-strength regiment of other men have gone there for the same game, and if all the orange trees were equally divided up, there might be one per man. As it is, the Youngun hasn't got his, and he resides in a palmetto-shack near Naples, and subsists on mullet and sweet potatoes."

"Mac, is he alone?"

I laughed, and stooped down and kissed her on the hair.

"All right, Kiddie, he's not married; and, as you're fool enough to want him, you shall have the beast. I'll go and clothe him, tell him about the Penitent Thief, and bring him over."

Now, I'd made up my mind that this was going to be one of those ideal things one reads about a match that was a love-match on both sides; but after six months had gone by, I began to have strong doubts as to whether it would turn out into a match at all. Young Fairbairn swallowed the Penitent Thief yarn, lock, stock, and barrel, and bought a frock coat and fine linen. He was probably the happiest man in London, and he assumed an air of easy patronage with the Kid, for which I lusted to kick him. He hadn't aged one bit in his years of vagabondage, because, amongst his few virtues, he did not drink, and was not addicted to head-work. He looked very smart and debonair, but when I saw him taking the Kid about, and playing the rdle of benevolent uncle, I felt more than riled. She, poor girl, looked wretched; yet what could a man do? A third person who interferes in these matters is usually, in the future, cut dead by both parties.

But at last I could stand it no longer. Young Fairbairn with his absurdly patronising airs made me burst rabidly into speech.

"D' you know, Mac," he said one day at the club, " that when I first came back here I very nearly got mashed on that Kid of ours. Thought of marrying her, I mean. Fact: I really did.

By the way, haven't you ever thought it's queer she never did pick up a husband? She's jolly good-looking; she's rich; and I swear no one would ever spot she isn't a lady. But," he concluded reflectively, " I believe she's one of those curious women who don't care twopence for any men."

It was then that I rose in my wrath, and shamefully abused part of a woman's confidence, and rent young Fairbairn into startled fragments. I spoke of the Penitent Thief. He had puzzled over that individual a little, but not much: didn't see that his identity mattered so long as the money was there. But when I drew his more special attention to the story, he saw that that deceased robber was an utterly impossible and apocryphal personage, and another light began to dawn upon him.

"My word, M'G., is this really true? Didn't this fellow ever exist? And is it the Kid who has really pensioned me?"

"Use the small wit the fates have given you," I snarled back.

"I deserve to be kicked."

"If ever a man did, you're he. But I thought you were in love with the girl all along, or you should have stayed in your palmetto-shack. What did you bring her up for? Why did you do hard labour in the Cape to pay those school fees?"

"Because that was the only one dogged thing I had in my nature. I swore to myself I'd rear up that Kid decently; and at other times I swore other things; but that was the only one I ever at all stuck to. But I didn't do it because I loved her not then, that is. I er I suppose I do love her now. Since I've come back, that is, and she's grown up. Yes, old man, of course I am honestly and really in love with her now."

I considered he was lying, but didn't say so: preserved instead the silence of the damned.

"You needn't glare at me in that way, Mac. In fact, confound me, I should like to know what the devil you mean by it? You seem in an infernal sulky temper this morning. I'll leave you. I'm going to look up the Kid."

"If you've anything of the gentleman left in you, you'll propose to her," I snapped out.

"You mind your own blasted business," retorted young Fairbairn, and slammed the door behind him.

I paced up and down the room, and relieved my feelings by addressing profanity to the chandelier. This employment soothes one under some circumstances.

Young Fairbairn did not turn up to a dinner appointment that night, much to the annoyance of a certain hostess with daughters; but I saw him next day at a private view, and the Kid was hanging close on his elbow. She was beaming. She was looking so absurdly happy that people stared a little and then smiled.

The rooms were crammed, and it was some time before we came together. But she caught my fi ye early on, and telegraphed to me a long bulletin in two oeillades and a lift of the eye brows. You see, I have come to understand the Kid's methods rather well. It is the way with a woman you are fond of. But at last the crowd surged, and I got across.

"Mac," she said, when I shook hands with her, "what have you been doing to the Youngun? He says he won't have you for his best man, and I can't get out of him why. Now sit down here with me and tell the reason at once."

XVI

THE RENEGADE

"DZE trade's nod what it was," said Schwartz, "we are getting shut in. It is those teufel English dot's shutting us."

"Don't abuse the English," said Moriarty; "they play fair, and we've got to take our chances. There's a bit too much of the sordid money grubber about you, mein Herr partner, for my taste. Now I'm this way: if I can't be with the hounds, I don't mind playing fox. I must be in the hunt somewhere. It's no use asking me to be a plain humdrum shopkeeper. I couldn't do it."

"No one asks you. You are slave dealer now, and dot's somewhere very different." Schwartz poured fresh tobacco into the china bowl of his pipe from a gourd, and a watchful negro girl brought her master a light from the cooking fire outside the hut. You have had your fun get ting dis grew together more fun than I liked und now what I say is, let us shkip for dze Goast, und find dhows, und get dze niggers sold in South Arabian ports, where dere's always a strong market."

"We've only eighty head of the beggars so far," said the Irishman, "and counting er casualties, it's doubtful if we can bring more than sixty of those to our friends the purchasers, even if we have the luck to dodge the cruisers and not lose any of the dhows. Now I say it's not enough. I'm in this business for the sport of the thing, as I've told you many a time already, but I'm in it for profit as well. And this coup isn't big enough for my taste, anywhere near."

"Ach, you want to get rich quick, und go back to Inkland, und be respectable once mores."

Moriarty laughed rather savagely. " Mr. Schwartz," he said, " if you were a gentleman, I'd hit you. You got the story of my mess out of me drunk, and I don't mind repeating it to you sober. A man who has been in the Service, and who got caught as I was, swindling you see I don't mince the word swindling at loo, clears out of England as fast as he can run, and he doesn't go back. If he did, the regiment would just eat him. But as I say, he doesn't go back, having some shreds of decency left. Still, the incident is one he naturally isn't proud of, and although if some bounder (who doesn't know better) drags it up a second time, and he doesn't smash that bounder's face without further warning, there is a distinct limit to his patience, and if the subject isn't dropped, he is bound to hit sooner or later. You quite see this officer's way of looking at it?"

"You talk outside me," said Schwartz, "but if I have said something you do not like, I am sorry. I do not play your English card game, loo. I play only sciart. Und for what do you want moneys if you wish not to leave dis Africa, und go somewheres else to be respectable?"

"Well, old man, the jaunt I have in my mind's eye at present is a bit of a tea-party in Zanzibar. I've been there once before, and beheld the place, and saw its opportunities; but I'd no money, and had to clear. Oh, you didn't know me there. It was before I'd come low enough I mean be fore I'd the felicity to become your partner over this slave-trading racket. However, you shall just see me in Zanzibar the next time, if I've got the funds. I'll paint that town the lightest tint of post-office red; I'll give the girls the most gorgeous kind of treat; and when I've got steam thoroughly up, I'll go and draw the British Con sul. Finest sort of entertainment imaginable that, Schwartz, when you're at some hole-in-corner foreign town, to go and solemnly pull the leg of the British Consul. I go and tell him I'm a persecuted Irish informer, paid by the Government to skip the country, followed everywhere, and in hourly dread of assassination. If I've luck, I can always persuade him that half the respectable residents of his town are subsidised by the Fenians to put a knife between my shoulder blades."

"Well, I am not dot kind of damfool myself. But I do not stand in the way of your desires. Let us trek, und so the sooner you can get to your red-painting " Herr Schwartz waved a hand to indicate the village with the White Nile swilling along its flank. " The use of this place is to us ended. The Inklish will get Khartoum to-morrow of the next day; dere was nothing who can stop dem getting Khartoum; und then in one month dey valse in here und make demselves king in the present thief-king's place."

"Rule Britannia," said Moriarty. " I bet they have a fine picnic of it, and make His Wickedness the King here sit up. A little hanging would do him a power of good."

"We haf all dze slave he can find for sell," said Schwartz. " He got no further use, und your meddlesome Inklish can hang him first und eat him afterwards for all I care. Girl, bring me fire. If you do not watch to see when my pipe is dead, I will haf you whipped."

"Yes, we're a grateful couple, aren't we? I wonder what force they'll send up to do the job. If they only bring Gippy regiments without a battalion or so of Tommies to stiffen them up, they'll be likely to catch a cold."

"Zo?" said Schwartz. " Then you must think small of your Inklish soldiers, und your Egypt mercenaries. Mit one tousand of any continen tal troops I would kill all dose peoples who live here " he jerked a contemptuous thumb towards the town " und set dem to float down der Nile for crocodile-chop. Ja, und I would not lose ten men doing it."

"Oh, get out," said the professional soldier. "There are twelve thousand fighting men here and in the district, and they have all got guns of sorts, with swords and spears and mountains of pluck to fall back upon. I tell you that some officer will find soon that this town is a toughish nut to crack."

"And I tell you that you are wrong. Dere is not a night comes but what fifty, hundred, two hundred, sometimes tousand peoples creep away from here und get gobbled up by big country out beyond there. Dey don't like the king because he sells dem for slaves some, or cuts off deir hands and feet when he has headache; und dey don't like dze Inklish dot's coming, pecause dey think dze Inklish how you say? anthropoph agous. You do not believe? Well, you have been away und you do not know. But I haf been here all dis time, und I can see mit mine eyes."

"Come to think of it, I have been away from here three months collecting that last batch of nig gers, and as you've been on the spot all the time, I suppose you will be better up in local politics. Well, there'll be less scrimmage when our chaps do come, and fewer funerals, and slower promotion, that's all. Rhodes won't be long in getting his through cable from the Cape to Cairo, now."

It appeared that the grimy Schwartz had something more to say on this point, for he was obviously working up his slim knowledge of the English tongue into the framing of a suitable sentence; but some other thought seemed to occur to him before that sentence was fit for delivery, and he stifled it in its birth. So the larger topic dropped between them, and they fell to talking of their own more immediate interests. The red-headed Moriarty told the successes and failures of his recent raid; how he had caught a dozen stout slaves here; how at the next vil lage every soul had got the alarm early, and escaped into the bush before he and his merry men came up; and how at another place, which he had surrounded with elaborate caution, and where he looked forward to a fat capture, he found confluent small-pox raging, and was temporarily deserted by his own men because he would not run away at the pace they chose for their hurried retreat. " By all the Saints," he finished up, " I've the makings of a rare buccaneer in me. I tell you I've regularly enjoyed myself sometimes. They were regular divils for a fight: both our own ruffians and the fellows we came across. I didn't envy you your barrack duty here, mein herr."

"Every man for his capacity," said the Ger man. I take what I am capable most of per forming. I was book-keeper once in Berlin till dze books go wrong, und when I come how do you say?"

"When you get out of chokey you want to be back at book-keeping again, eh? You're a most business-like creature, Schwartz."

"Well," said Schwartz, " here is what I haf done," and he reeled out long catalogues of house keeping, and slave-guarding, and bribes to the savage potentate who had given them camproom. The account was redolent with figures and arid facts, and Moriarty lay back in his chair and yawned and made but a limp show of attention. But the German mouthed his statement with gusto. As he said, every man has his own particular favourites amongst the affairs of life.