Kate Meredith, Financier

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

However, the royal patience, which had never been strung out to such a length before, reached its breaking strain that day at Malla-Nulla under circumstances already recorded, and what the King could not obtain by this new diplomacy he very naturally made up his mind to get hold of by methods which were more native to his experience.

Being moreover a strategist with a good deal of sound elementary skill, he did not give the enemy time to bring in reinforcements after the first news of danger. Kwaka's embassy was a reconnoitring expedition as much as anything, and the detail that the brazen Kwaka should be scared out of his seven senses by the man whose red head the King had already ordered for a palace ornament, was a small thing which stood beyond his calculation. A force of 500 picked men lay in bivouac a bare five miles inland from the factory; the ju-ju signs on the bush roads protected these from all espionage; and when night fell, a ju-ju man who was the King's special envoy performed a ceremony which he said, and which they understood, granted the soldiers a special dispensation against those ghosts which all West African natives know haunt the darkness. So they advanced to the attack through the gloom of the steaming forest shades, those of them who were pagans with high spirit and fine hopes of loot, and those of them who were Moslemin filled with a vague fear which they gleaned from Kwaka's hints.

Now Carter did not fall into the usual Englishman's trick of despising his enemy. Indeed he had that figure of 20,000 fighting men firmly lodged in his head, and short of the opportune arrival of a British gunboat, expected sooner or later a furious fight. But he reckoned that Kwaka would have to go back to Okky City with his report, and afterwards return from thence with an attacking force; and he counted also on the African's fear of ghosts, and looked with confidence to no disturbance during the hours of darkness.

So although he worked the sweating factory hands at high pressure in piling up puncheons and cases, and bales of cloth, and sacks of salt into a substantial breastwork, he went to bed himself that night and felt, as he tucked in the edge of the mosquito bar, that few white men on the Coast had ever earned better a spell of sleep.

It was at 2 A.M. when the Okky yell and the crash of a volley of pot-leg woke him, and he leaped up and through the gauze in one jump. He ran out onto the veranda, and met there Laura Slade. She was dressed, and had in her hand the cheap Skipton revolver which he had given her, and towards the purchase of which his father had once contributed a hard-to-spare ten shillings out of the whole half guinea that it cost. Moonlight poured down upon them pure and silvery from a clear night overhead, but all the land below up to the level of the veranda was filled with a mist that was white and thick as cotton wool. In this fog invisible black men screamed and yelled and cursed, and occasionally there came to them the red glare, and the roar, and the raw black-powder-smoke smell of the flintlocks.

"The beggars will rush those barricades," said Carter, "if I don't look out. You stay here, Laura, and put that pistol down. It's a beastly dangerous toy."

"I may want it for myself."

"Don't be melodramatic. Now run into the mess-room, there's a good girl, and get down those two Winchesters, and load up the magazines. I'm going down to help the boys."

But even as he spoke there came a sudden hard puff of the land breeze that made the mist swirl and twist up into ghostly life, and left canals and pools of clearness. He darted inside, snatched up one of the rifles, and crammed it full of cartridges. "I wish I'd a scatter-gun," he said. "I used to be a nailer at rabbits and the occasional grouse at home. However, it won't do to miss here, although the tool is new." He threw up the weapon to his shoulder, and shot as a game shot shoots, with head erect and both eyes staring wide at a leather charm-case on the broad black chest which he picked as his object. He did not know how to squint along the barrel. Then he pressed home the trigger, and had the thrill of knowing that he had shot his first man.... He warmed to the work after that, and fired on and on with deadly speed and accuracy, till the heated barrels of the repeaters burned Laura Slade's hands as she charged the magazines beneath them. From somewhere in the lower part of the factory came White-Man's-Trouble, and when in answer to the fusillade, showers of pot-leg began to rustle over the veranda and scream through the roof, that valiant person presently dragged out bedding to form a breastwork. But although Carter kicked him till his foot ached the Krooboy would not show his own head over it sufficiently to use a gun for the mutual defence. He stuck to it stolidly that he was a "plenty-too-much bad shot," and Carter was too much occupied in keeping up his own fire to spare time for further coercion. But as he changed rifles with Laura, he said every poisonous thing to White-Man's-Trouble that his mind could invent, and that African listened, but made neither answer nor reply.