when he cast his eyes over the frail wreck of a man in the Madeira
chair, he forebore. It would not take very much of a jar to send Captain
Nilssen away from this world to the Place of Reckoning which lay beyond.
And so with a gulp he said instead: "You're sure it's deliberate
poisoning?"

"Quite. The nigger who came here last about the business promised to set
ju-ju on me, and I told him to do it and be hanged to him. He was as
good as his word. I began to be bad the very next day."

"How's it managed?"

"Don't know. They have ways of doing these things in Africa which we
white men can't follow."

"Suspect any one?"

"No. And if you're hinting at Mrs. Nilssen in the pilotage there, she's
as staunch as you are, bless her dusky skin. Besides, what little chop
I've managed to swallow since I've been bad, I've always got out of
fresh unopened tins myself."

"Ah," said Kettle; "I fancied some one had been mixing up finely
powdered glass in your chop. It's an old trick, and you don't twig it
till the doctors cut you up after you're dead."

"As if I wasn't up to a kid's game like that!" said the sick man with
feeble contempt. "No, this is regular ju-ju work, and it's beyond the
Belgian doctor here, and it's beyond all other white men. There's only
one cure, and that's to be got at the place where the poisoning palaver