“He’s not been long attached to the Force,” answered Sub-Inspector Ladell.
“Yes, I know, but where did you pick him up?”
“That’s more than I can tell you. He’s rather a pet of the Commandant’s; helps him to find new sorts of butterflies and creeping things that the old man is dead nuts on collecting. So he took him on in the native detective line.”
Harley Greenoak did not reply, but his thoughts took this very definite shape—
“That’s all very well, but a taste for entomology on the part of an untrousered savage isn’t going to get this escort safe and sound to the Kangala Camp. One more occasion for keeping one’s eyes wide-open.”
The object of this inquiry was a thick-set, very black-hued Kafir, at the present moment not untrousered, for he wore the F.A.M. Police uniform of dark cord, and was driving one of the two ammunition waggons, which, with their escort, were just getting out of sight of the solid earth bastion of Fort Isiwa. The said escort consisted of sixty men, under the command of a Sub-Inspector, beside whom Greenoak was riding. With him was Dick Selmes. The latter now struck in—
“What’s the row with Jacob—eh, Greenoak?”
“I don’t know that I said anything was.”
“No. But you’d got on that suspicious look of yours when you spoke of him. I believe you’re out of it this time. Now, I should say Jacob was as good a chap as ever lived, even though he is as black as the ace of spades. I’ve been yarning with him a heap.”
“Have you? I think I’ll follow your example then,” returned Greenoak, reining in his horse so as to bring it abreast of the foremost of the ammunition waggons, ahead of which they had been riding.