"If it's any little thing like murder, dontcher know, why the
border's just a few hours up the line."

"Murder!" exclaimed the mate, and uttered a bark of laughter.

They were possibly a little afraid of him. He had the physique of a
fighter and the presence of a man accustomed to exercise a crude
authority. Their protests and warnings died down; and, after all, a
man's life and death are very much his own concern in those regions.

"D'you think he's mad?" one of them was whispering when the mate
turned to Hop Sing again.

"Set up the drinks for them," he commanded. "I'll not wait meself,
but here's the money."

"You not dlink?" asked the Chinaman, as the mate laid the coins on
the counter.

"No," was the reply. "No need to spoil another glass."

He gave a half nod to the other men, but no word, pulled his hard hat
forward on his brow, and walked out to the aching sunlight, and
towards a path that led between two iron huts to the fringe of the
riotous bush. The telegraphists crowded to look after him, but he did
not turn his head. He paused beneath the great palms, where the
ground was clear; then the thigh-deep grass, which is the lip of the
bush, was about him, grey, dry as straw, rustling as he thrust
through it with the noise of paper being crumpled in the hands. A
green parrot, balancing clown-like on a twig, screamed raucously; he
glanced up at its dazzle of feathers. Then the wall of the bush
itself yielded to his thrusting, let him through, and closed behind
his blue-clad back. Africa had received him to her silence and her
mystery.

"Well, I'm blowed!" The tall telegraphist stared at the place where
he had vanished. "I say, you chaps, we ought to go after him."

No one moved. "I shouldn't care to come to my hands with him," said
another. "Did you did you see his face?"

They had all seen it; the speaker was voicing the common feeling.

"It's like drinkin' at a wake," observed the tall man, his glass in
his hand. "Well, here's to his memory!"

"His memory," they chorused, and drank.

But the end of the tale came later. It was told in the veranda of
Father Bates's house at Beira, by Dan Terry, as he lay on his cot and
drank in the air from the sea in life-restoring draughts. He had been
up in the region of lost and nameless rivers for three years of fever
and ague and toil, and now he was back, a made man ready to be done
with Africa, with square gin bottles full of coarse gold to sell to
the ba