"Very sick. I looked into his room and found him lying in his bunk. He couldn't talk."
"I put him there. Found the old fool preaching to those beasts on all fours this morning, and looked on till he dropped; then I lugged him under cover."
"Any more dead?"
"Five pegged out during the night. They were lying pleasantly in and amongst the others, and there were seven more sick. I told the head-man when I went down with the padre to have them put over the side or I'd kill him. And when I came back I found he'd shoved over the whole dozen. The man-and-a-brother's a tolerable brute when he comes to handling his own kind, Mr. Calvert."
We went out then and set the passenger-boys to washing down decks. We could not give them the hose because there was no donkey working; but they drew water in buckets and holystoned and scraped and scrubbed till they cleaned the infection out of the decks, and sweated it out of themselves. The cholera seemed to have exhausted itself. There were three other cases, it is true, but they were mild, and none died. In their fright the boys would have chucked their friends overboard as soon as they were taken sick, but I promised the head-man to shoot him most punctually if any one went over the side who was not a pukka corpse, and if niggers were addicted to gratitude (which they are not), there are gentlemen now living on the Kroos coast who might remember me favourably. For we did get in. A B. and A. boat picked us up three weary days later, and towed us at the end of an extremely long hawser into the very place to which I wanted to go.
Of course Fernando Po, being Spanish, kept us very much at arm's length; and we did a thirty days' most rigid quarantine, which made (after the last case had recovered) a matter of forty days in all. But we had no more deaths, and the bishop pulled up into fine form. He was not a man that I could ever bring myself to like, and as Tordoff was for the most part sullen and unwishful for talk, the time that we swung to our anchor off Port Clarence was not exhilarating.
Still it was pleasant to think that one was alive, and to realise that one had got respectably out of a very tight corner—yes, one of the tightest. The tramp's two boats never turned up again. I suppose they carried cholera away with them, and drifted about in the belt of equatorial calms, full of sun-dried corpses, till some tornado came and swamped them. So that we three were the only Europeans left out of thirty-four, and of the two hundred and thirty negroes who left Banana in the Congo, only seventy-four came to Fernando Po. It was a tolerable thinning out, but when it came to climbing the peak, that made up for all which had gone before. Indeed it is a wonderful mountain.
I saw Tordoff again just as I was going away from the island, and tried to put it to him delicately that I was not badly off, and would like to give him a lift if the thing could be managed.
"No, Mr. Calvert," he said, "thanks. I prefer to go to the devil my own gait. I don't suppose you'd ever know who I am; but if anybody describes me and asks, just say you haven't seen me."
