“Not even a little bit.”
“Well, bluff’s a good dog sometimes,” sneered the other, who thought he would enjoy a different situation directly. “Still, you take my tip and skip, with the smallest loss of time you can manage. I don’t suppose they’ll bother to follow up the thing very keenly once you’re clean out of the country. And if you’re wise you mighty soon will be. Get out through Swaziland and into German territory if you can, or at any rate keep dark. Halse will be able to help you.”
All this while Denham had been looking at the speaker with a kind of amused curiosity. At the close of the above remark he said—
“What’s the matter with you?”
“What d’you mean?” snarled Stride, who was fast losing his temper.
“Mean? Why, that I’m wondering why you asked me to come out with you to listen to all the nonsense you have just been talking. You’re not drunk, any fool can see that, and yet you fire off some yarn about some Jew found drowned, or murdered, or something, down in the Makanya; and talk about chains and missing links and all sorts of foolishness, and on the strength of it all invite me to ‘skip.’ Really the joke strikes me as an uncommonly thin one.”
“It’ll take the form of an uncommonly thick one,” snarled the other, “and that a rope, dangling over a certain trap-door in Ezulwini gaol. Well, I thought to do you a good turn, came up here mostly to do it, and that’s how you take it. Well, you may swing, and be damned to you.”
Denham lit a fresh cigar. He offered his case to his companion, but it was promptly refused.
“Now let’s prick this bubble,” he said, looking the other fair and straight in the eyes. “From a remark you made in the club the other evening I gathered you wanted to insinuate that I had murdered some one. That, of course, I didn’t take seriously.”
“There may have been others who did, though,” interrupted Stride.