his while Denham had been looking at the speaker with a kind of
amused curiosity. At the close of the above remark he said--

"What's the matter with you?"

"What d'you mean?" snarled Stride, who was fast losing his temper.

"Mean? Why, that I'm wondering why you asked me to come out with you to
listen to all the nonsense you have just been talking. You're not
drunk, any fool can see that, and yet you fire off some yarn about some
Jew found drowned, or murdered, or something, down in the Makanya; and
talk about chains and missing links and all sorts of foolishness, and on
the strength of it all invite _me_ to `skip.' Really the joke strikes
me as an uncommonly thin one."

"It'll take the form of an uncommonly thick one," snarled the other,
"and that a rope, dangling over a certain trap-door in Ezulwini gaol.
Well, I thought to do you a good turn, came up here mostly to do it, and
that's how you take it. Well, you may swing, and be damned to you."

Denham lit a fresh cigar. He offered his case to his companion, but it
was promptly refused.

"Now let's prick this bubble," he said, looking the other fair and
straight in the eyes. "From a remark you made in the club the other
evening I gathered you wanted to insinuate that I had murdered some one.
That, of course, I didn't take seriously."

"There may have been others who did, though," interrupted Stride.

"No matter. Then you roll up here, and suggest that I am wanted as the
murderer of some unknown Jew, whose top end appears to have been found
in the Makanya bush. You know, if I were less good-natured, you might
get into serious trouble over such a thing as that. You insinuated it
in the presence of the Halses, too."

"Meaning an action for slander, I suppose. Go ahead. I defy you to
bring it. Do you hear? I defy you to bring it."

"It isn't worth while. Still, if you go on spreading these stories all
over the country I may be compelled to. It's one thing to make
accusations, but quite another to prove them. To prove them," he
repeated emphatically, with his eyes full upon the other's, and a sudden
hard ring coming into his tone with the last words.

Inwardly Stride was conscious of his first misgiving in the matter. He
was as certain in his own mind that the man before him had, for some
reason or other, killed the one, part of whose remains had been found,
as that the sun shone. But between certainty and proof was a far cry.
He was not lawy