found further excuse for much else that puzzled and shocked him. At
home, death had been a contingency so remote that he had put it aside as
something he need not consider until he was a grandfather. At Matadi, at
every moment of the day, in each trifling act, he found death must be
faced, conciliated, conquered. At home he might ask himself, "If I eat
this will it give me indigestion?" At Matadi he asked, "If I drink this
will I die?"

Upsher told him of a feud then existing between the chief of police and
an Italian doctor in the State service. Interested in the outcome only
as a sporting proposition, Upsher declared the odds were unfair,
because the Belgian was using his black police to act as his body-guard
while for protection the Italian could depend only upon his sword-cane.
Each night, with the other white exiles of Matadi, the two adversaries
met in the Café Franco-Belge. There, with puzzled interest, Everett
watched them sitting at separate tables, surrounded by mutual friends,
excitedly playing dominoes. Outside the café Matadi lay smothered and
sweltering in a black, living darkness, and, save for the rush of the
river, in a silence that continued unbroken across a jungle as wide as
Europe. Inside the dominoes clicked, the glasses rang on the iron
tables, the oil lamps glared upon the pallid, sweating faces of clerks,
upon the tanned, sweating skins of officers; and the Italian doctor and
the Belgian lieutenant, each with murder in his heart, laughed,
shrugged, gesticulated, waiting for the moment to strike.

"But why doesn't some one _do_ something?" demanded Everett. "Arrest
them, or reason with them. Everybody knows about it. It seems a pity not
to _do_ something."

Upsher nodded his head. Dimly he recognized a language with which he