"But, Kate, George and I have no quarrel. Why, it was you——"
"If you haven't a quarrel, my dear, invent one, if it's only for the amusement of making it up. I'm told it's one of the chief luxuries of an engagement. Now, please go, or you'll disturb Hossein. Hossein's the man who wants attention here, and I can't have you bothering about the place till he's better."
Hossein was in fact the lucky man. Miss O'Neill, for reasons best known to herself, nursed him in person; Carter retained his interest as original discoverer; White-Man's-Trouble fussed round him because it was the popular thing to do, and Laura was also diligent in her attendance on the sick room for reasons well-known to herself.
But Ali ben Hossein had all a Moslem gentleman's diffidence with women, and he said little enough to either Laura or Kate; the Krooboy was his caste inferior, and he spoke to him only to give curt orders; and it was to Carter alone that he was communicative.
His native tongue was Haûsa, of course, but he had been a trader all his life, and that in West Africa entails a knowledge of languages. Carter knew little enough of Haûsa, but he was handy with Okky and sound on Kroo, and so when one vocabulary failed him, he passed on to another, and was generally understood. Thus, by very rapid degrees an intimacy grew between them, to as far an extent as the color barrier would permit.
They talked on weapons and they talked on war; they talked of sport as each of them understood it; they talked on horse-breeding as it was practised in Kano and Sokoto, and also of horse-breeding as it was carried on in the Craven district and the Yorkshire dales.
Carter tried without any success whatever to make Hossein understand the humor of the battle of the roses as it was waged between his father and mother in the Yorkshire vicarage; the Haûsa in his turn gave the light side of a slave-hunting raid, and made Carter's flesh creep.
They had abundant interests in common, too, in the romance of commerce, and discussed regretfully the decay of ivory and the sensational rise of rubber. Carter as the paid servant of O'Neill and Craven tried to hear of rubber lands which could be bought and resold to an English company, but Ali ben Hossein was emphatic in his refusal to help a white immigration onto the acres of his fatherland.
"Let us talk as traders, oh Effendi. Do not ask me to be the traitor who will make smooth the path for the invader. And for the present I bid you to consider this shortage in the supply of pink kola nuts. Now, the white kola nuts, which have not that dryness which is demanded by the palates of the Western Soudan, we can get from Lagos and the Coast factories in larger quantities than ever. But the growers declare the crop of pink nuts to be practically a failure this year, and therein I say they lie."
And so on, with matter which had too technical a flavor to carry general interest.