“A saddle?”
“Yes, or what remained of one. The offside flap had been torn off, so had both stirrup-irons, the stirrup leather remained. Now comes the curious part of it. While I was looking at the thing and wondering how the devil it got there, I suddenly spotted a round hole in the flap that remained. It looked devilish like a bullet hole, and I’m dead cert, it was.”
“That’s rum,” said Robson, now vividly interested.
“Isn’t it? It took me rather aback. What’s more, the saddle looked as if it hadn’t been so very long in the water. What do you make of it?”
“What did you do with it?”
“Do with it? I loaded it up and left it with Dickinson at Makanya. He’s the sergeant of police there, and has a name for being rather smart.”
“Well, and what was his notion?”
“We talked it over together and agreed the affair looked uncommonly fishy. It had evidently been a good saddle too, not one that a nigger would ride on. But how had it got there, that’s the point?”
“Ay, that’s the point.”
“You see there’s no drift for miles and miles above the Bobi drift. It’s all that beastly fever-stricken Makanya forest, and there’s nothing on earth to induce a white man to go in there. And, as I said, there’s no doubt but that the saddle had belonged to a white man. Both Dickinson and I agreed as to that.”