thereafter of walk
or wait.

"Didn't I tell you?" moaned Brown of Lumbwa. "Didn't I say walkin' 'ud
be only just my luck?"

So we walked, and reached Nairobi a long way ahead of Coutlass and his
gang, whose shoes, among other matters, pinched them; and we were
comfortably quartered in the one hotel several hours before the arrival
of Lady Saffren Waldon and those folk who elected to wait for the
breakdown gang and the relief train.

It was a tired hotel, conducted by a tired once-missionary person, just
as Nairobi itself was a tired-looking township of small parallel roofs
of unpainted corrugated iron, with one main street more than a mile
long and perhaps a dozen side-streets varying in length from fifty feet
to half a mile.

He must have been a very tired surveyor who pitched on that site and
marked it as railway headquarters on his map. He could have gone on
and found within five miles two or three sightlier, healthier spots.
But doubtless the day's march had been a long one, and perhaps he had
fever, and was cross. At any rate, there stood Nairobi, with its
"tin-town" for the railway underlings, its "tin" sheds for the repair
shops, its big "tin" station buildings, and its string of
pleasant-looking bungalows on the only high ground, where the
government nabobs lived.

The hotel was in the middle of the main street, a square frame building
with a veranda in front and its laundry hanging out behind. Nairobi
being a young place, with all Africa in which to spread, town plots
were large, and as a matter of fact the sensation in our corner room
was of being in a wilderness--until we considered the board partition.
Having marched fastest we obtained the best room and the only bath, but
next-door neighbors could hear our conversation as easily as if there
had been no division at all. However, as it happened, neither Coutlass
and his gang nor Lady Saffren Waldon and her maid were put next to us
on either side. To our right were three Poles, to our left a Jew and a
German, and we carried on a whispered conversation without much risk.

She and her maid arrived last, as it was growing dusk. We had already
seen what there was to see of the town. We had been to the post-office
on the white man's habitual hunt, for mail that we knew was
non-existent. And I had had the first adventure.

I walked away from the post-office alone, trying to puzzle out by
myself the meaning of Lady Saffren Waldon's pursuit of us, an