Then he took up his matchet again, spat in his great right hand to get a good grip on the hilt, lay down on the mat before the door and went to sleep.
The room pinged with mosquitoes; a leopard roared persistently from the bush at the back of the factory, and a rat somewhere up in the rafters gnawed at a sounding piece of board with irritating persistence. Moreover, of course there was the probability of the Okky men coming to the factory at any moment for that much talked-of massacre. But none of these things disturbed White-Man's-Trouble. He suddenly wished for sleep, and therefore to sleep he promptly resigned himself. All thoughts of anything beyond that immediate desire were blotted out from his simple brain. The patient might awake, and rave, or want assistance; but that did not matter. Nothing mattered beyond his wish there and then for sleep.
The beautiful unreliability of his tribe was strongly present in White-Man's-Trouble.
Mr. Smith had been away from his creature comforts for a spell of twenty hours, and most of that time had been spent on the thwart of a dancing surf boat in the embraces of a dank sea fog. He had been divorced from food, stimulant and tobacco smoke for all that time--the surf boat had been twice upset in getting off, and drowned all the matches--and as a consequence his temper was vile, and his language was sulphurous. He was barely thankful when he came back to the beach again and found Malla-Nulla factory neither burned nor looted; he was openly ungrateful when he found that the last of the stock of limes had gone mouldy, and realized for the moment a Coast cocktail was beyond the limitations of art. As a consequence Mr. Smith romped up and down the untidy mess-room in a state bordering on frenzy, and in his own especial polyglot reviled the unknown K. O'Neill as the _fons et origo mali_.
In addition to the legitimate boat boys, the whole of the other factory boys had been crammed into the surf boat, and as a consequence they also were chilled, cramped, and bad-tempered. His own body servant was openly insolent when commanded to produce dry tobacco and a pipe. And when on the top of all this Mr. Smith opened Carter's bedroom door, stumbled over the sleepy White-Man's-Trouble, and was promptly floored by that nervous savage and threatened with a well-filed matchet, the remaining rags of his temper at last gave way. He sat there on the floor, a very unkempt figure, and for five minutes without stopping (or repeating himself) said exactly what he thought.