n the golden wig
was washed up from the river that the mysterious kraal people, silent
and impassive, seemingly ignorant of all but their duties, yet knowing
every single thing that passed at the farm, even down to the use of the
false hair (though Bernard van Cannan himself had never suspected
this), gave him back to those who awaited.

If Dick Saltire had not so thoroughly understood the native mind and
inspired the confidence of his boys, the truth might never have been
known. As it was, it lay in his power to relate to those whom it
concerned that a certain woman named Sophy Bronjon, formerly nurse to
the van Cannans, and sent away by them to be conveyed to Robin Island
because she had developed leprosy, had never left the precincts of the
farm, but stayed there, brooding over the little ones she loved. The
kraal people to whom (though a mission-educated woman) she belonged had
hidden and sheltered her. Through Meekie's instrumentality, she
undoubtedly knew all that passed on the farm, and as surely as she had
noted the fate of the van Cannan heirs, she recognized Christine as an
ally and friend, and had warned her as best she could of the dangers
that beset Roddy. It was she who had sighed and whispered through the
closed shutters, frightening Christine at first, but in the end
engendering trust, and it was she who, on hearing of the narrow escape
of Roddy from the tarantula, had made up her mind to spirit him, with
the aid of Meekie and the storm, from the farm and its dangers until
the return of his father.

With the disappearance of Mrs. van Cannan and the death of Saxby, the
menace was removed and the child brought back as silently as he had
been taken away. Even he knew no more than that he had dreamed a
strange dream.

Saltire went to meet Bernard van Cannan at Cradock, taking with him the
papers left in his care by Richard Saxby. There was not so much to
explain to the owner of Blue Aloes, as might have been expected. The
doctor who treated him for neuritis and found him dying of slow
poisoning by antimony had lifted the scales from his eyes, and a little
clear thought, away from the spell of the woman known as Isabel van
Cannan, had done much to show him that the sequence of tragedies in his
home was due to something more than the callousness of fate. Thus he
was, in some measure, prepared for Saxby's confession, though not for
the fact that the woman he had adored to fanaticism had never been hi