nk, and a curious story to tell of a thing he had seen in the
back country.

It was evening when he told it, propped up on his pillows, with the
blankets drawn up under his chin, and his lean, leathery face, a
little softened by his fever, fronting the long, benevolent visage of
Father Bates. The Father had a deckchair, and sprawled in it at
length, listening over his deep Boer pipe. A faint, bitter ghost of
an odor tainted the still air from the mangroves beyond the town, and
there was heard, like an undertone in the talk, the distant
slumberous murmur of the tide on the beach.

"But how did you first get to hear of him?" the Father was asking,
carrying on the talk.

"Oh, that was queer!" said Dan. "You see, I was making a cut clean
across country to that river of mine, and, as far as I could tell, I
was in a stretch of land where there hasn't been one other white man
in twenty years. Bad traveling it was swamp, cane, and swamp again
for days; the mud stinking all day, the mist poisoning you all night,
the cane cutting and scratching and slashing you. It was as bad as
anything I've seen yet. And it was while we were splashing and
struggling through this that I saw, lying at the foot of an aloe of
all created things an old hat. I thought for a moment that the sun
had got to my brain. An old, hard, black bowler hat it was, caved in
a bit, and soaked, and all that, but a hat all the same. I couldn't
have been more surprised if it had been an iceberg. You see, except
my own hat, I hadn't seen a hat for over two years."

Father Bates nodded and stoked the big bowl of his pipe with a
practiced thumb.

"It might ha' meant anything," Dan went on; "a chap making for my
river, for instance. So the next Kaffir village I came to I went into
the matter. I sat down in the doorway of the biggest hut and had the
population up before me to answer questions."

"They were willing?" asked the Father.

"I had a gun across my knees," explained Dan; "but they were willing
enough without that. And a queer yarn they had to tell, too; I
couldn't quite make it out at first. It began with an account of a
village hit by smallpox close by. Their way of dealing with smallpox
is simple: they quarantine the infected village by posting armed men
round it until all the villagers are starved to death or killed by
the smallpox. Then they burn the village. It costs nothing, and it
keeps the disease under. This village, it seems, was particularly