“Well, I don’t want to make trouble, you can pay half.”
“I shall do nothing of the sort.”
“Give me five shillings, and the palaver’s set.”
“Certainly not.”
“Master, dash me two shillings for the boy that hold the horse, and I go fetch him.”
I thought it would not do to push my advantage too far, so I agreed to these terms, and in a few minutes this scoundrel brought out, from the penetralia of some hovel in the village—my missing steed.
I climbed into the saddle, threw the money at the man’s head, and then, with my whip—but no, I won’t say what I did, or I shall have the “poor black brother society” of Exeter Hall down on me. It is sufficient to say that I rode off in a more happy frame of mind, though still annoyed to think that after the many years during which I had been acquainted with the negro I should have been such an idiot as to imagine that a Christianized and English-speaking low-class specimen of the species could be polite and obliging without having some ulterior scheme of insult or extortion in view.
On my return to Bathurst I learned that Bakko enjoyed anything but an enviable reputation. It appeared that its inhabitants were outcast Mandingos, who had found it advisable to leave their native country, and who, while thoroughly grasping the full meaning of meum, had but hazy and unsatisfactory notions as to the interpretation of tuum, in consequence of which their society was rather avoided, and they were rarely seen in the haunts of civilisation, except on those few occasions on which the intelligent police might be observed escorting them towards a public building yclept the jail.
From Bakko I rode on over open country, adorned with herds of short-horned cattle and solitary pie-bald sheep with long tails, and where occasionally the wild ostrich may be seen, to Josswang, close to Cape St. Mary. There are a few houses here, which, in the palmy days of the colony, were the country residences of the Bathurst merchants, but which now are affected by the universal blight which has fallen upon the settlement and fast becoming ruinous. Ten miles from Cape St. Mary is the Mandingo town of Sabbajee, now belonging to British Combo, which was the scene of one of the glorious exploits of the great advertiser Colonel Luke S. O’Connor, who commanded a force which took the town, stockaded like all such, by assault. That individual’s mania for self-laudatory memorials was so great that on this occasion he, as Governor, took away two large kettledrums which had been captured by a West India Regiment, and, after a short interval, returned them to the regiment, embellished with two silver plates, which set forth that he, during his administration of the government, had presented these drums to it for gallantry in the field; and then sent in a bill for the plates.
He is not the only peculiar governor with which the Gambia has been afflicted; one in particular I can remember who was notorious for his parsimony throughout West Africa. I had known this potentate when he revolved in a more humble sphere, and during one of my visits to Bathurst (I shall not say in what year) I allowed myself the honour of calling on him. At about 1 p.m. I presented myself at the door of Government House and knocked; not a soul was to be seen anywhere, and the place might have been deserted. I kept on knocking louder and louder for some minutes, and then as nobody answered and the door was wide open I walked in. I traversed one room, and, turning round the corner of a screen, discovered a person attired in very seedy garments employed in cutting mouthfuls off a slab of mahogany-coloured meat which lay in a plate on a chair. This was the governor, but I should never have recognised him in that position had it not been for the suit of clothes he was wearing and which I remembered having seen on him some years before. He received me with great affability, asked me to sit down, and conversed about mutual acquaintances. He did not ask me to join him in his lunch, for which I was not sorry, but he did ask me to have a glass of wine. He said: