"The senhor is what you call a fire-eater, is it not? But even with a good appetite it is possible to eat too much. Is the senhor going to take his last meal?"
Da Silva talked leisurely as though he enjoyed the conversation. He looked carelessly around the trading office, where in orderly confusion lay books and papers containing records of many a cargo of cotton, palm oil, rubber, mahogany logs and the like from the opulent interior. For this, the highest trading station on the Bawa River, was the channel through which the produce of a vast savage country went to the coast, where cotton goods of pronounced colors went in exchange for lumps of wild rubber, and where square-face gin or various jimcracks bought so much oil or kernel.
Jim Dean managed this factory, from which he had to account to a board of directors in Liverpool for his doings, and for his profits and losses. Of late there had been losses, for from the wild interior had come tales of caravans attacked, of laden canoes cut off, of villages, where stores were accumulated, raided, with rumors and threats of worse things.
So far as he was personally concerned, this present incident was the apex of the unexpected. He was sitting in his office sweating at his books when three natives, coming in as he supposed on trading business, without ceremony, gripped him in their odorous arms, flung a grass rope about him, and trussed him up like a fowl ready for the roast.
A fourth man, Da Silva, had superintended the operation.
"I'd give six months' wages to have a quarter of an hour at handling you with bare fists," snapped Dean. "I should hate touching your hide with my fingers, but I'd do it like I might have to lift a bit of dirt out of my food."
"The senhor makes it no easier for himself," said the Portuguese with a show of teeth.
"You just put your gun away and give me my hands free and I'll show you something," returned Dean spitefully.
The patience of the dago man suddenly came to an end. He withdrew his eyes from sight of the brown river beyond the veranda, whither they had dreamily wandered, and suddenly set them viciously on the white man.
"I'm going to give you three minutes," he said. "If you are still acting the fool, then I shall shoot. You know what I want. Down river at the Bawa factory is a steamer just arrived from a British port. Among her cargo are a thousand rifles, with ammunition. For purposes of my own, not unconnected with my desire to be top dog in this portion of Africa, I want to get possession of those arms, and to do so I want to send such a message to the coast as will insure the steamer hurrying up the river with this part of her cargo aboard. Therefore, you will write on the company's note paper, in your own hand, something to the effect that the station is in the extremest danger, that the whole hinterland is risen, and that unless you have arms and ammunition in plenty sent you at once, the whole factory and those in it will be wiped out of existence. It's a million to one they'll send the steamer up, for it would be the quickest, and there's deep water all the way. Now, I'll dictate the exact words to you. You won't mind writing it, anyhow, because it's true."