Drunkenly, through a red cloud of mist, he heard himself
shouting, "The _black_ nigger! The _black nigger!_ He touched me! I
_tell_ you, he touched me!" Captain Nansen led Everett to his cot and
gave him fizzy salts, but it was not until sundown that the trembling
and nausea ceased.
Then, partly in shame, partly as a bribe, he sought out the injured boy
and gave him the entire roll of cloth. It had cost Everett ten francs.
To the wood-boy it meant a year's wages. The boy hugged it in his arms,
as he might a baby, and crooned over it. From under the blood-stained
bandage, humbly, without resentment, he lifted his tired eyes to those
of the white man. Still, dumbly, they begged the answer to the same
question.
During the five months Everett spent up the river he stopped at many
missions, stations, one-man wood posts. He talked to Jesuit fathers, to
_inspecteurs_, to collectors for the State of rubber, taxes, elephant
tusks, in time, even in Bangalese, to chiefs of the native villages.
According to the point of view, he was told tales of oppression, of
avarice, of hideous crimes, of cruelties committed in the name of trade
that were abnormal, unthinkable.
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