"I no fit."
"Am I to hurt your feelings with this piece of packing-case lid?"
"Oh, Carter, you look see. There's a nail in him there."
"I know there's a nail in it. The occasion demands a nail, and I picked the weapon for that reason. Now, then, are you going to obey orders, or will you take a first-class licking?"
"Oh, Carter, I fit for do what you say."
"Good. You're an excellent boy when you're handled the right way. Now go to the feteesh and bring the biggest coil of that inch lead piping you can stagger under."
Carter himself went to Slade's room and brought from there one of those crude carved wooden figures which the natives make and the traders pick up as curiosities. At home they are sold for stiff prices as the gods of the heathen; but the negroes that make them are not idolaters, and what they exactly are for the present writer knoweth not, save only that they are not articles of worship. Locally they come under that all-embracing term ju-ju, which includes so much and explains so little.
Carter found a brace and bit—an inch twist bit, which for a wonder was in a calabash of yellow palm oil, and so not rusty—and he worked on these carved men till the sweat ran from him. Laura came out and told him that he was inviting an attack of fever, which was obvious, since by then it was high noon, and violent exertion for a white man with the thermometer above par always has to be paid for on the Coast. But he drove her back again into the house and out of the heat with a volley of chaff, and went gaspingly on with his tremendous work.
The mouths of the figures were wide, but with knife and drill he splayed them wider, but was careful always not to distort them beyond the canons of local art; and in a couple of hours' time he was ready for White-Man's-Trouble and the heavy coils of lead piping.
"Regard," he said, "O thou assistant to the great white ju-ju man. We will place one of these graven images opposite the entrance of each road which comes from the bush into this factory clearing. We'll hoist it up onto a green gin box, so, and give it a bit more height and dignity. And we'll add a necklace of these green cigarette tins, which have already advertised themselves into an ugly notoriety. Then, into this hole you see in the back of each image, we will fit an end of lead piping, and as the holes are tapered, the unions will make themselves good. Then, O helper of dark schemes, we'll pay out the coil, as far as possible in swamp where it will sink out of sight, and bring all the ends into the house here. Any piping that shows, you must throw earth over. Savvy? And the inside ends we'll splay out with this hardwood cone that I've made, till a man can get his mouth well into them and shout down the tube comfortably. I'm sure you catch the idea?"