The Arab makes a murmur of assent and stalks away to his own people, while Hazon returns to where he has left his white colleague.
"Well, Holmes, according to Lutali, they are bent on risking it," he begins, throwing himself upon a rug and proceeding to fill a pipe.
"Are they? I'm not altogether glad, yet if it tends towards hurrying us out of this butchery line of business I'm not altogether sorry. I think I hate it more and more every day."
"It isn't a bad line of business, Holmes," returns Hazon, completely ignoring the smothered reproachfulness, resentment even, underlying the tone and reply. "Come, now, you've made a goodish bit of money the short time you have been at it. Anyhow, I want to know in what other you would have made anything like as much in the time. Not in fooling with those rotten swindling stocks at the Rand, for instance?"
"Maybe not. But we haven't realized yet. In other words, we are not safe out of the wood yet, Hazon, and so it's too soon to hulloa. I don't believe we are going to get off so easily," he adds.
"Are you going to get on your croaking horse again, and threaten us with 'judgments' and 'curses,' and all that sort of thing?" rejoins the other, with a good-humoured laugh. "Why, man, we are philanthropists—real philanthropists. And I never heard of 'judgments' and 'curses' being showered upon such."
"Philanthropists, are we? That's a good idea. But where, by the way, does the philanthropy come in?"
"Why, just here." Then, impressively, "Listen, now, Holmes. Carry your mind back to all the sights you have seen since we came up the Lualaba until now. Have you forgotten that round dozen of niggers we happened on, buried in the ground up to their necks, and when we had dug up one fellow we found we had taken a lot of trouble for nothing because he'd got his arms and legs broken. The same held good of all the others, except that some were mutilated as well. You remember how sick it made you coming upon those heads in the half darkness; or those quarters of a human body swinging from branches, to which their owner had been spliced so that, in springing back, the boughs should drag him asunder, as in fact they did? Or the sight of people feeding on the flesh of their own blood relations, and many and many another spectacle no more amusing? Well, then, these barbarities were practised by no wicked slave-raiders, mind, but by the 'quiet, harmless' people upon each other. And they are of every-day occurrence. Well, then, in capturing these gentle souls, and deporting them—for a price—whither they will perforce be taught better manners, we are acting the part of real philanthropists. Do you catch on?"
"What of those we kill? Those Wangoni brutes are never happy unless killing."
"That is inevitable and is the law of life, which is always hard. And, as Lutali would say, who may fight against his destiny? Not that I mean to say we embarked in this business from motives of philanthropy, friend Holmes; I only cite the argument as one to quiet that singularly inconvenient conscience of yours. We did so, Stanninghame and I, at any rate, to make money—quickly, and plenty of it; and I'm not sure Stanninghame doesn't need it more than you and I put together."