However, the royal patience, which had never been strung out to such a length before, reached its breaking strain that day at Malla-Nulla under circumstances already recorded, and what the King could not obtain by this new diplomacy he very naturally made up his mind to get hold of by methods which were more native to his experience.
Being moreover a strategist with a good deal of sound elementary skill, he did not give the enemy time to bring in reinforcements after the first news of danger. Kwaka's embassy was a reconnoitring expedition as much as anything, and the detail that the brazen Kwaka should be scared out of his seven senses by the man whose red head the King had already ordered for a palace ornament, was a small thing which stood beyond his calculation. A force of 500 picked men lay in bivouac a bare five miles inland from the factory; the ju-ju signs on the bush roads protected these from all espionage; and when night fell, a ju-ju man who was the King's special envoy performed a ceremony which he said, and which they understood, granted the soldiers a special dispensation against those ghosts which all West African natives know haunt the darkness. So they advanced to the attack through the gloom of the steaming forest shades, those of them who were pagans with high spirit and fine hopes of loot, and those of them who were Moslemin filled with a vague fear which they gleaned from Kwaka's hints.
Now Carter did not fall into the usual Englishman's trick of despising his enemy. Indeed he had that figure of 20,000 fighting men firmly lodged in his head, and short of the opportune arrival of a British gunboat, expected sooner or later a furious fight. But he reckoned that Kwaka would have to go back to Okky City with his report, and afterwards return from thence with an attacking force; and he counted also on the African's fear of ghosts, and looked with confidence to no disturbance during the hours of darkness.
So although he worked the sweating factory hands at high pressure in piling up puncheons and cases, and bales of cloth, and sacks of salt into a substantial breastwork, he went to bed himself that night and felt, as he tucked in the edge of the mosquito bar, that few white men on the Coast had ever earned better a spell of sleep.