He nodded.
“Yes, I do. The furthest of those two poor devils stuck up there against the rock—ugh!—was poor old Hensley—my old uncle.”
“Good lord!”
“Yes indeed. I was able to identify him by several things—ugh, but it wasn’t a nice job, you understand. But the mystery is not how he couldn’t be found at the time, but how the deuce such a neat little devil hole could exist on the place at all, unknown to any of us. Why, you can’t get in—or out of it—at all from the top, only through the hole we slipped in by. It’s like a false bottom to a box by Jove. Yes—it’s rum how such a place could exist.”
I thought so too. So now poor old Hensley’s disappearance stood explained; and the explanation was pitiable. He had been beguiled—or forcibly brought—to the hell pit of cruelty where these demons performed the dark rites of some secret superstition, and there horribly done to death by the water torture. When I thought of the one who had been destined to succeed him, and who by the mercy of Providence had been snatched from their fiendish hands just in the nick of time, a sort of “seeing red” feeling came over me, and had they been in my power, I could have massacred all four of the prisoners with my own hand.
“Let’s see if we can get anything out of them, Kendrew,” I said. “Manvers won’t mind.”
But Inspector Manvers did mind—at first. Then he agreed. They would be started off for the Police Camp that night; however, as they were here we could talk to them.
We might just as well have saved ourselves the trouble. Ivondwe, who had been kept apart from the others, smiled sweetly and wondered what all the bother was about. He could not imagine why he had been seized and tied up. However that would soon come right. Government was his father, but it had made a mistake. However he, as its child, could not complain even if his father had made a mistake. It would all come right.
The witch doctor simply refused to speak at all, but the young men jeered. One of these I seemed to recognise.
“Surely I have seen thee before?” I said. “Where?”