“Yes—and Timmy was a nice chap when he first came. Manicured his fingers—dressed for dinner and all of that. Shaved every day, Heaven forbid. Well, you saw him last week. Bleary and smeared, in a bath towel and singlet, with a native huzzy for a wife, and a sick mind. After two years and a month. Went completely off his nut the day after you were at Maraban. I had to take him out to Forcados. Headquarters down there gave up in despair and appointed me in his place. Todd,” the new agent continued savagely, puffing rapidly at his cigarette, which winked brightly in the shadows, “it’s only leather bellies like you and me who should be sent up to the lonely stations where all the people one sees are negroes. I tell you, they’ve got to come to it. I never knew but one youngster who came through decently. That was Charles Markley. ’Member him?”
“Well, rather,” chuckled the captain. “I was just reading in the Times about his success as a radio wizard back home. Seems he’s succeeded in eliminating static, or something.” He kicked another deck chair into being and sat down. “Do you remember when he first came out, Mac? I brought him up river while he was nursing the worst grouch I ever saw.
“It was such a night as this, all silver and black, I recall, when I took him up to your hell’s hole at Maraban. The jungle was sloshing and squawling over there, and Markley sitting about where you are, staring at the moon with hard eyes, set in a face sour as spoiled milk. He was rather handsome, tall and long-legged as the best of the English are, and I liked him.
“I came up with an idea of giving him some friendly advice, like I do all your slaves, MacAllister, though a fine lot of good it does. Well, after we’d started a conversation, or rather, after I had made some sort of attempt at it, I said: ‘Mr. Markley, you want to be verra careful about the amount of whisky you drink in this climate. It’s deadly.’
“Maybe that wasn’t very tactful, but how can you be tactful with an overgrown, sulky boy. Anyway, he turned round with a snap and says: ‘Mr. Todd,’ says he, ‘I intend to make a big dent in the liquor supply of Nigeria inside of the next three years.’
“Which gave me a sort of shock, for most of the boys come out maundering of high ideals, clean living and Sir Galahad morality—when they first arrive, that is.
“ ‘And you must be careful about mixing up wi’ the native girls, at all, at all,’ I went on. ‘You’ll be thinking I’m insulting you now, but men will do strange things when they’re lonely, and it always leads to trouble.’
“ ‘I’m sorry to disappoint, Mr. Todd,’ he snaps, ‘but that’s just what I want to inquire into immediately. If you should happen to know of any reasonably clean, good-looking negro girl of not over seventeen, I wish you’d buy her for me, or whatever their beastly custom is here, and send her over to Maraban as soon as you can. I’d greatly appreciate it, and pay well.’
“You can imagine that shut me up right quickly and I left Mr. Markley to his own sour thoughts, whatever they were.
“The Lagarto tied up at the oil wharf at Maraban next morning, and he got ashore, dressed in an old pair of khaki breeches, a sleeveless jersey and a pair of tennis shoes. He looked a sight, and I half expected the sun to shrivel him up before my eyes. His baggage consisted mostly of two huge boxes which he grudgingly admitted contained radio apparatus, a few books, among which I saw one named ‘Studies in Pessimism’ by some German author—a few others, equally dismal, and ten cases of Scotch whisky. I suppose you discovered this soon enough, but it fair made me stagger when I thought that it was over and above the whisky already at the station. He said good-by decently, and I left him standing there, thinking black thoughts and batting at the flies which buzzed around his head.”