At the first attack runners came to him imploring help. It was useless to send his half-baked soldiers without going himself. They knew no other leader; there was not a negro among them fit to take a command; and he himself was tied. He said nothing to Clay, but just sent a refusal, and remained at his post.
Again and again came clamorous appeals for help against these new invaders, and again and again he had to give the same stubborn refusal. His vaunted New Republic was being split up again into its primitive elements; the creed of the South Shields chapel was being submerged under a wave of red-hot Mohammedanism; and the ivory, that hard-earned ivory, with all its delicious potentialities, was once more being lifted by alien raiders, and this time forever beyond his reach.
Clay got some inkling of what was going on, and repeatedly urged him to be off at once and put things straight in person. "Don't you worry about me, Skipper," he'd say. "I'll get along here fine by myself. Nobody'll come to worry me. And if they did, they'd let me alone. I'm far too unwholesome-looking to chop just now."
But Kettle always stolidly refused to leave him. Indeed, with difficulty (for he was at all times a painfully truthful man) he used to lie to his patient and say that there was no need for him to go at all; that everything was going on quite as they could wish; and that he was vastly enjoying the relaxation of a holiday.
But in sober fact things were going very much awry. And every day they got worse. Even his original bevy of troops, those he had brought up with him into the country on the stern-wheel launch, seemed to grasp the fact that his star was in the descendant. There was no open mutiny, for they still feared him too much personally to dare that; but in the black unwatched nights they stole away from the village, and every day their numbers thinned, and the villagers followed their lead; and when the end came, the two lonely white men had the village to themselves.
Clay's last words were typical of him. Kettle, with devotional intent, had been singing some hymn to him, which he had composed as being suitable for the occasion. But the dying man's ears were dulled, and he mistook both air and words. "You're a good fellow to sing me that," he whispered. "I know you don't like striking up that sort of music. By Jove! I heard that song last at the Pav. Good old Piccadilly Circus."