a scare get rubbed home into his stupid brain, and let him get started
off on the run, and he is an awkward person to stop.

But Kettle did not start to hustle his black laborers back to work at
once. He knew that there would be heavy mortality amongst them once they
were exposed to fire, and he wanted to lose as few of them as possible.
He had got use for them afterward. So for long enough he worked alone,
and the bullets spattered around him gayly. He hammered out a lead
templet to cover the wound in the boiler, which, of course, as bad luck
would have it, was situated at a place where three plates met; and then
whilst Balliot's armorer with fire and hammer beat out a plate of iron
the exact counterpart of this, he rigged a ratchet drill and bored holes
through the boiler's skin to carry the necessary bolts.

Clay volunteered assistance once, but as he was told he would be asked
for help when it was needed, he squatted down under the sheltered side
of the boiler again, and smoked, and played more music-hall ditties on
the banjo. Commandant Balliot held to a sullen silence. He was growing
to have a poisonous hatred for this contemptuous little Englishman who
by sheer superiority had made him give up his treasured dictatorship,
and he formed schemes for the Englishman's discomfiture in the
near future.

But for the present he hoped very much that the man would not be killed;
he recognized, with fresh spasms of anger every time he thought about
it, that without Captain Kettle there would be no future--at any rate on
this earth--for any of them.

And meanwhile Captain Owen Kettle, stripped to shoes and trousers,
sweated over his work in the baking heat. Twice had a bullet grazed him,