Clay woke up from the anaesthetic, sick, shaken, but still courageous as ever. "Well," he gasped, "you've made a fine dot-and-go-one of me, Skipper, and that's a fact. When you chuck the sea, and get back to England, and set up in a snug country practice as general practitioner, you'll be able to look back on your first operation with pride."
Kettle, shaken and white, regarded him from a native stool in the middle of the hut. "I can't think," he said, "how any men can be doctors whilst there's still a crossing to sweep."
"Oh," said Clay, "you're new at it now, and a bit jolted up. But the trade has its points. I'll argue it out with you some day. But just at present I'm going to try and sleep. I'm a bit jolted up, too."
Now, it is a melancholy fact to record that Dr. Clay did not pull round again after his accident and the subsequent operation. To any one who knows the climate, the reason will be easily understood. In that heated air of Central Equatorial Africa, tainted with all manner of harmful germs, a scratch will take a month to heal, and any considerable flesh wound may well prove a death warrant. Captain Kettle nursed his patient with a woman's tenderness, and Clay himself struggled gamely against his fate; but the ills of the place were too strong for him, and the inevitable had to be.
But the struggle was no quick thing of a day, or even of a week. The man lingered wirily on, and in the mean while Kettle saw the marvellous political structure, which with so much labor and daring he had built up, crumbling to pieces, as it were, before his very eyes. A company of Arab slave-traders had entered the district, and were recapturing his subject villages one by one.
At the first attack runners came to him imploring help. It was useless to send his half-baked soldiers without going himself. They knew no other leader; there was not a negro among them fit to take a command; and he himself was tied. He said nothing to Clay, but just sent a refusal, and remained at his post.
Again and again came clamorous appeals for help against these new invaders, and again and again he had to give the same stubborn refusal. His vaunted New Republic was being split up again into its primitive elements; the creed of the South Shields chapel was being submerged under a wave of red-hot Mohammedanism; and the ivory, that hard-earned ivory, with all its delicious potentialities, was once more being lifted by alien raiders, and this time forever beyond his reach.
Clay got some inkling of what was going on, and repeatedly urged him to be off at once and put things straight in person. "Don't you worry about me, Skipper," he'd say. "I'll get along here fine by myself. Nobody'll come to worry me. And if they did, they'd let me alone. I'm far too unwholesome-looking to chop just now."
But Kettle always stolidly refused to leave him. Indeed, with difficulty (for he was at all times a painfully truthful man) he used to lie to his patient and say that there was no need for him to go at all; that everything was going on quite as they could wish; and that he was vastly enjoying the relaxation of a holiday.
But in sober fact things were going very much awry. And every day they got worse. Even his original bevy of troops, those he had brought up with him into the country on the stern-wheel launch, seemed to grasp the fact that his star was in the descendant. There was no open mutiny, for they still feared him too much personally to dare that; but in the black unwatched nights they stole away from the village, and every day their numbers thinned, and the villagers followed their lead; and when the end came, the two lonely white men had the village to themselves.