"Haven't an idea. A dead nigger, maybe."

"No fear. It was a saddle. What d'you think of that?"

"A saddle?"

"Yes, or what remained of one. The offside flap had been torn off, so
had both stirrup-irons, the stirrup leather remained. Now comes the
curious part of it. While I was looking at the thing and wondering how
the devil it got there, I suddenly spotted a round hole in the flap that
remained. It looked devilish like a bullet hole, and I'm dead cert, it
was."

"That's rum," said Robson, now vividly interested.

"Isn't it? It took me rather aback. What's more, the saddle looked as
if it hadn't been so very long in the water. What do you make of it?"

"What did you do with it?"

"Do with it? I loaded it up and left it with Dickinson at Makanya.
He's the sergeant of police there, and has a name for being rather
smart."

"Well, and what was his notion?"

"We talked it over together and agreed the affair looked uncommonly
fishy. It had evidently been a good saddle too, not one that a nigger
would ride on. But how had it got there, that's the point?"

"Ay, that's the point."

"You see there's no drift for miles and miles above the Bobi drift.
It's all that beastly fever-stricken Makanya forest, and there's nothing
on earth to induce a white man to go in there. And, as I said, there's
no doubt but that the saddle had belonged to a white man. Both
Dickinson and I agreed as to that."

Robson sat puffing at his pipe for a few minutes in silence. He was
thinking.

"I wonder if it spells foul play," he said eventually. "Quite sure it
was a bullet hole, Harry?"

"Well, I put it to Dickinson without mentioning my own suspicions, and
he pronounced it one right away."

"I wonder if some poor devil got lost travelling alone, and got in among
a disaffected lot who made an end of him. They may have shot his horse
to destroy all trace, or in trying to bring him up to a round stop.
Anyway, why the deuce should they have chucked the saddle into the
river? It isn't like a nigger to destroy assetable property either.
No. As you say, Harry, the thing looks devilish fishy."

"What about the stirrup-irons being gone, Robson?"

"That makes more for my theory. Metal of any kind is valuable to them.
They can forge it into assegais. Besides, anything hard and shining
appeals to them."

Stride started upright.

"By Jove!" he cried suddenly. "There's one point I forgot. The girths
were intact. Th