"I'm sure you do," said Carter civilly. "I'm afraid I'm the slacker. You let me have such an easy time of it whilst my arm was getting well, that I've slid off into lazy ways. I must buck up, and if you'll load the work onto me, Mr. Smith, you'll find I can do a lot more."
Swizzle-Stick Smith dried the perspiration from his eye socket, fixed his glass into a firmer hold, and stared. "Well," he said at last, "you are a d—d fool." And there the talk ended.
It was that same day that Carter had his first introduction to Royalty. He was in the retail store—"feteesh," they call it on the Coast—weighing out baskets of palm kernels, measuring calabashes of orange-colored palm oil, judging as best he could the amount of adulterants the simple negro had added to increase the bulk, and apportioning the value in cotton cloth, powder, flintlock guns at twelve and six-pence apiece, and green cubical boxes of Holland gin. Trade proceeded slowly. The interior of the feteesh was a stew of heat and odors, and the white man's elaborate calculations were none of the most glib. To knock some idea of the fairness of these into the black man's skull was a work that required not only eloquence, but also athletic power. The simple savage who did only one day's shopping per annum was willing always to let the delights of it linger out as long as possible, and all the white man's hustling could not drive the business along at more than a snail's pace.
By Coast custom, work for Europeans starts in those cool hours that know the daybreak, and switches off between eleven and twelve for breakfast; and thereafter siesta is the rule till the sun once more begins to throw a shadow. But on this particular day, when Swizzle-Stick Smith had knocked out his pipe and turned in under his mosquito bar, Carter sluiced a parrafin-can full of water over his red head by way of a final refreshment, and went down once more from the living rooms of the factory to the heat and the odors of the feteesh below.
The sweating customers saw him come and roused up out of the purple shadows, and presently the game of haggle was once more in full swing.
Carter had a natural gift for tongues, and was picking up the difficult Coast languages to the best of his ability, but his vocabulary was of necessity small, and a Krooboy stood by to translate intricate passages into idiom more likely to penetrate the harder skulls. The Krooboy wore trousers and singlet in token of his advanced civilization, and bore with pride the name of White-Man's-Trouble.
There was a glut of customers that baking afternoon. High-scented trade stuffs poured into the factory in pleasing abundance, and bundles of European produce were balanced upon woolly craniums for transportation through bush paths to that wild unknown Africa beyond the hinterland. The new law of K. O'Neill allowed no lingering in the feteesh. Once a customer had been delivered of his goods, and had accepted payment, White-Man's-Trouble decanted him into the scalding sunshine outside, and bade him hasten upon his ways. K. O'Neill had stated very plainly, in a typewritten letter, that the leakage by theft was unpleasing to the directorate in Liverpool, and must be stopped. K. O'Neill understood that the thefts took place after a customer had spent all his cash on legitimate purchase, as then all his savage intelligence was turned to pilfering. Carter, as the man on the spot, recognized the truth of all this, and carried out the instructions to the foot of the letter.
Mr. Smith warned him he would have trouble over it. "Ever since the first factory came down to blight this Coast," Smith explained, "the boys have been allowed to hang around the feteesh and steal what wasn't nailed down. They look upon it in the light of a legitimate discount, and it's grown up into a custom. Now in West Africa you may burn a forest, or blot out a nation, or start a new volcano, and nobody will say very much to you, but if you interfere with a recognized custom, you come in contact with the biggest kind of trouble."
"Still," Carter pointed out, "these orders are definite."
"And you are the kind of fool that goes on the principle of 'obeying orders if you break owners.' Well, go ahead and carry out instructions. I won't interfere with you. I'd rather like to see this cocksure K. O'Neill get a smack in the eye to cure his meddling. And for yourself, keep your weather eye lifting, or some indignant nigger will ram a foot of iron into you. It's the Okky-men I'd take especial care of if I were you. They've got their tails up a good deal more than's healthy just now. I'm told, too, that their head witch doctor wants his war drum redecorated." Mr. Smith grinned—"I don't want to be personal, of course."