AN ALLY

ILLUSTRATED BY J.R. SKELTON

Published in The Windsor Magazine, Vol LII, Jul 1920, pp 126-132

THERE was nothing of the traditional explorer about Jim Craddock. He was not a strong, silent man with a stern brown face and marked absence of flesh, but he was a first"chop" hand at the game, all the same. Moreover, he wrote no books, he contemplated nothing in the way of geographical discovery to London societies, but his knowledge of Central Africa was extensive and peculiar, and if there was a remote corner of the Dark Continent where threepence was to be made, then assuredly Craddock was the man to find it. For the most part he was a freelance, though when times were bad he was not averse to enlisting under the banner of some trading company or as a guide to the sporting"blood" in search of big game. Usually, however, he preferred to work on his own, because this course allowed him to travel about just as he pleased, generally in the company of the humorist who carefully camouflaged himself under the name of Jan Stewer—a sort of left-handed compliment to the county that had given him birth. But, as to the rest, Stewer said nothing, except occasionally to hint that, like the Van Diemen's Land convicts in the old days, he had left his country for his country's good. It was only occasionally and in boastful moments that Stewer ever alluded to the fact, and then only in the presence of Craddock. He was a big strong bull of a man, with a marvellously cool nerve and a certain whimsical humour in time of danger that rendered him invaluable.

Craddock himself was small and lean and brown, with a merry eye and a fearsome taste for music which would have driven anybody but Stewer wild. He travelled the world with a sort of accordion arrangement of his own invention, and it was his proud boast that this weird instrument had had a more soothing effect on the gentle native than anything in the way of melody that had ever been heard on the Dark Continent. And now he was up amongst the Moghis, with an entirely fresh arrangement for capturing the senses of that somewhat turbulent people. It took the form of a gramophone with some exceedingly fine records, mostly of operatic stars.

Craddock and his friend were in that part of the world more or less by accident. They had been having an exceedingly bad time lately, and it had become necessary to seek fresh woods and pastures new, and, moreover, reports had reached Craddock to the effect that there was much ivory in that remote spot. This rumour, however, proved to be false, and, beyond a certain amount of exceedingly inferior rubber, there seemed to be little or nothing to recompense the