"Oh, you were, were you?" said Peter. "I don't much care about seeing that
sort of thing myself. Some fellows think it's the best fun out to see the
niggers kick; but I can't stand it: it turns my stomach. It's not liver-
heartedness," said Peter, quickly, anxious to remove any adverse impression
as to his courage which the stranger might form; "if it's shooting or
fighting, I'm there. I've potted as many niggers as any man in our troop,
I bet. It's floggings and hangings I'm off. It's the way one's brought
up, you know. My mother never even would kill our ducks; she let them die
of old age, and we had the feathers and the eggs: and she was always
drumming into me;--don't hit a fellow smaller than yourself; don't hit a
fellow weaker than yourself; don't hit a fellow unless he can hit you back
as good again. When you've always had that sort of thing drummed into you,
you can't get rid of it, somehow. Now there was that other nigger they
shot. They say he sat as still as if he was cut out of stone, with his
arms round his legs; and some of the fellows gave him blows about the head
and face before they took him off to shoot him. Now, that's the sort of
thing I can't do. It makes me sick here, somehow." Peter put his hand
rather low down over the pit of his stomach. "I'll shoot as many as you
like if they'll run, but they mustn't be tied up."

"I was there when that man was shot," said the stranger.

"Why, you seem to have been everywhere," said Peter. "Have you seen Cecil
Rhodes?"

"Yes, I have seen him," said the stranger.

"Now he's death on niggers," said Peter Halket, warming his hands by the
fire; "they say when he was Prime Minister down in the Colony he tried to
pass a law that would give their masters and mistresses the right to have