CHAPTER III.

A QUICK WAY WITH REBELS.


Another bullet came silently up out of the distance, and the nigger
second engineer of the launch gave a queer little whimper and fell down
_flop_, and lay with his flat nose nuzzling the still warm boiler. A
hole, which showed up red and angry against the black wool just
underneath his grass cap, made the diagnosis of his injury an
easy matter.

The noise of the shot came to them quite a long time afterward, when the
little puff of smoke which had spirted up from the distant sandbank had
already begun to thin under the sunshine; but it was that gun-crack, and
not the sight of the dead engineer, which gave the working negroes their
final scare. With loud children's cries, and queer dodgings of fear,
they pitched down their working tools, and fled to where the other black
soldiers and passengers were lying on the iron floor-plates of the
launch, in security below her water-line.

The Belgian Commandant, from his shelter at the other side of the
boiler, swore volubly, and Clay, the English doctor, laughed and twanged
out a music-hall tune on his banjo. Kettle, intent on getting his vessel
once more under command, was for driving the negro crew back to their
work by the simple methods peculiar to the British merchant officer. But
this Commandant Balliot forbade, and, as he was Kettle's superior in
the Congo Free State service, that small mariner had (very much against