"The time came when I got amusement out of those letters from headquarters; for their faults were so plain that I conceived the headquarters staff having much time to spend, and a sort of instruction at large to administer ginger to men, like myself, on the spot, on general principles, so to keep us not only alive, but brisk and anxious; and doing it with the inconsequential abandon of little children playing with sharp knives. I got comfort from that view; and when I looked round my placid domain where my men, with whom I was on good terms, laboured easily and rightly under the still woods, I told myself I was still fretting because the business was new, that things would come easier soon. But at night I felt I was anxious exactly because it was all so old and familiar to me.
"One day, having given a group of men at work in a distant corner of the clearing some advice, I noticed a little path enter the wood beside a big tree. I had never been into the forest. To tell the truth, I had had no time. The trees stood round us, keeping us from--what? I had always felt a little doubt of what was there and could not be seen. I turned inwards. I found myself at once in a cool gloom. I went on curiously, peering each side into those shadows, where nothing moved, and in an hour came to another clearing, smaller than my own, and with no river in view. By the sun, which now I saw again, this place was north of our station. The opening was being rapidly choked by a new growth. I was turning for home again, for the afternoon was late, when I saw a hammock slung between two saplings beside a dismantled hut. I could just see the hammock and hut through the scrub. I went over there, and was so carefully looking for snakes and beastly things in the bush that I had arrived before I knew it. The hut had been long abandoned. The hammock had something in it, and I was turning something in my mind as I went up to it. There were some ragged clothes in the bottom of it, partly covering bones, and among the rags was a globe of black hair.
"Next morning I woke late, feeling I had gone wrong. My hands were yellow and my finger nails blue, and I was shaking with cold. But the tootling of an up-coming steamer forced me to business. The steamer was towing six lighters, filled with labourers. They were Poles, I think. Afterwards, I learned, some hundreds of these men had been collected for us somewhere by a clever, business-like recruiting agent, who promised each poor wretch a profitable time in the Garden of Eden. My responsibility, thirty of them, was landed. They stood by the river, gaping about them, wondering, some alarmed, more of them angry, most clad in stuffy woollens, poor souls. Having the fever, I was not very interested. I told my negro foreman to find them shelter and to put them to work. We were making our clearing larger, and were building more store-houses.
