Just after breakfast, but before they got up from table, Stride produced a square envelope.
“I took a few snapshots down in the Makanya the other day,” he said, drawing out some prints. “What d’you think of that, Mr Denham?” handing one across the table to him.
Denham took it, and it was all he could do not to let it drop. The ghastly face staring at him from the glazed paper, hideous and bloated through immersion and decomposition, was that of the head which Sergeant Dickinson had been at such pains, and trouble, and risk to photograph. There was a frightful fascination about it, and he continued to gaze, aware the while that Stride was fixing his face with a pitiless glance.
“Well, what d’you think of it?” said the latter, growing impatient.
“Think? Why, that it’s a good study of a dissecting-room subject, but a beastly thing to spring upon any one just after breakfast. Where did you get it?” handing it back.
“It was taken below the Bobi drift. A head was found sticking in the bushes, also some clothes, with things in the pockets. I, before that, found a saddle with a bullet hole through the flap.”
“Yes; you told us that at the club the other night, I remember. So they’ve found more?”
Stride was puzzled. He thought to have knocked the enemy all of a heap, but the said enemy had never wilted, beyond what a man might naturally do who had an unusually ghastly and repulsive picture suddenly sprung upon him, as Denham had said, just after breakfast.
“But isn’t it our turn to be let into the mystery?” suggested Verna sweetly.
“Oh, I don’t know. No; I won’t show it to you,” answered Stride. “It is rather nasty, isn’t it, Mr Halse?” handing it on to him.