the time. He had shown Commandant Balliot what he was pleased to term a
quick way with rebels.

But Commandant Balliot, whose life had been saved, and army disarmed and
brought back from rebellion in spite of himself, was not the man to let
any vague feeling of gratitude overweigh his own deep sense of injury.
He was incompetent, and he knew it, but Kettle had been tactless enough
to tell him so; and, moreover, Kettle had thrown out the national gibe
about Waterloo, which no Belgian can ever forgive. Commandant Balliot
gritted his teeth, and rubbed at his scrubby beard, and melodramatically
vowed revenge.

He said nothing about it then; he even sat at meat with the two
Englishmen, and shared the ship duties with them without so much as a
murmur. He could not but notice, too, that Kettle said nothing more now
about being supreme chief, and had, in fact, tacitly dropped back to his
old position as skipper of the launch. But Balliot brooded over the
injuries he had received at the hands of this truculent little sailor,
and they grew none the smaller from being held in memory.

Kettle's own method of reporting his doings, too, was not calculated to
endear him to the authorities. He steamed down to headquarters at
Leopoldville, went ashore, and swung into the Commandant's house with
easy contempt and assurance. He gave an arid account of the launch's
voyage up the great river to the centre of Africa and back, and then in
ten words described Balliot's disaster, his rescue, and its cost. "And
so," he wound up, "as the contract was outside Mr. Balliot's size, I
took it in my own hands and carried it through. I've brought back your
blooming army down here. It's quite tame now."