"You've had the kiddie long enough now," he urged. "Let me have him. Come here, Mr. Mars, and sit beside me, and I'll give you fizzy water—like lemon-squash, only nicer." He held out a wet bottle of champagne alluringly.
"No, he is coming to his consul," that youth declared. "He's coming to his consul for protection. You are not fit characters to associate with an innocent child. Come to me, little boy, and do not listen to those degraded persons." So the "innocent child" seated himself between the consul and the chartered trader, and they patted his fat calves and red curls and took his minute hands in their tanned fists, eying him hungrily, like two cannibals. But the little boy was quite unconscious and inconsiderate of their hunger, and, with the cruelty of children, pulled himself free and ran away.
"He was such a nice little kiddie," they said, apologetically, as though they felt they had been caught in some act of weakness.
"I haven't got a card with me; I haven't needed one for two years," said the lieutenant, genially. "But fancy your knowing Sparks! He has the next station to mine; I'm at one end of the Shire River and he's at the other; he patrols from Fort Johnson up to the top of the lake. I suppose you've heard him play the banjo, haven't you? That's where we hit it off—we're both terribly keen about the banjo. I suppose if it wasn't for my banjo, I'd go quite off my head down here. I know Sparks would. You see, I have these chaps at Chinde to talk to, and up at Tete there's the Portuguese governor, but Sparks has only six white men scattered along Nyassa for three hundred miles."
I had heard of Sparks and the six white men. They grew so lonely that they agreed to meet once a month at some central station and spend the night together, and they invited Sparks to attend the second meeting. But when he arrived he found that they had organized a morphine club, and the only six white men on Lake Nyassa were sitting around a table with their sleeves rolled up, giving themselves injections. Sparks told them it was a "disgusting practice," and put back to his gunboat. I recalled the story to the lieutenant, and he laughed mournfully.
"Yes," he said; "and what's worse is that we're here for two years more, with all this fighting going on at the Cape and in China. Still, we have our banjos, and the papers are only six weeks old, and the steamer stops once every month."
Custom House, Zanzibar.
Fortunately there were many bags of bees-wax to come over the side, so we had time in which to give the exiles the news of the outside world, and they told us of their present and past lives: of how one as an American filibuster had furnished coal to the Chinese Navy; how another had sold "ready to wear" clothes in a New York department store, and another had been attaché at Madrid, and another in charge of the forward guns of a great battle-ship. We exchanged addresses and agreed upon the restaurant where we would meet two years hence to celebrate their freedom, and we emptied many bottles of iced-beer, and the fact that it was iced seemed to affect the exiles more than the fact that it was beer.