He had reached the group by this time, and took up in his own the damp black hand of offended majesty, and shook it heartily. He broke out in a stream of fluent Okky, and gradually the potentate's wrath melted. The King still gesticulated violently, and apparently demanded Carter's red head upon a charger as a prelude to truce, but Swizzle-Stick Smith was an old Coaster and knew his man.
"Champagne," Mr. Smith kept on suggesting, "bubbly champagne with plenty of Angostura bitters in it to make it bite. I call attention to your Majesty's historic thirst. Come up into the factory, old Tintacks, and we'll break up a case in honor of the day."
Finally the King, who being a West African king was necessarily a shrewd man, decided that though vengeance would keep till another day, Mr. Smith's champagne might not; and he let himself be led back to the factory, and up the stair. He graciously accepted the most solid-looking of the long chairs in the veranda, sat in it carefully, kicked off his slippers, and tucked his feet beneath him. He waved away Mr. Smith's further speech. "Oh, Smith," he said, "I fit for champagne-palaver, one-time," and loosened the tuck of his ample waist-cloth to give space for the expected cargo. "No damn use more talk-palaver now."
Outside in the sunlight the Haûsa soldiers had taken the cue from their master, and dissolved away unobtrusively; the carriers were dismissed to the Krooboys' quarters under the charge of White-Man's-Trouble, who, now that the disturbance was over, bustled up with many protestations of sorrow for his unavoidable absence, and Carter was left for further attendance on his distressed damsel.
For the first time he found himself able to regard her critically; and he was somehow rather disturbed to find before him a girl who was undeniably beautiful. When he had rushed blindly in to the rescue, he had taken it for granted that the person he saw so vaguely through that red mist was an English or an American missionary woman in distress, and (to himself) excused his mad lust for battle by picturing himself as the champion of the Christian martyr beset by pagans.
The white missionary women of that strip of the Coast occasionally quartered themselves at Malla-Nulla factory on their journeyings, in spite of the very niggardly civility of Mr. Smith, and Carter had been much impressed in the way beneficent Nature had safeguarded them by homely features and unattractive mien from attack by the other sex. He could have taken off his hat to one of these, and said: