“All wrong. I fly at higher game. Now then!”
“Not——”
“The Administrator!”
Ally whistled. “You don’t say so!” he said. “How the deuce did it happen?”
“He met me trespassing on the estate and asked me to go. Now I think of it, he never said why he was there, but he seemed like a second owner.”
“Oh, he is well in with all the Planters. Well?”
“He asked me to go, as I say, and I went. Listen, Ally”—and she left him and walked round to her end of the table—“he became almost confiding about the natives. I shall know his schemes yet, and then I can tell you, and knowledge is power! He will think you have divined his mind.”
“Catch me divining his mind! It would be like groping in a fusty roomful of blue-books! Oh, by the way, Chum, Gurney wants to sell that grey pony of his—I think we might as well have another.”
“No, but do listen, Ally! At present the native question is so hopeless because of the mixed races and opposing interests, but if a good breed predominated—the Hovas, for instance—and we could get them to come over and leaven the lump——”
A big hard-backed beetle had floundered on to the table right in front of Alaric’s plate, and instinctively he had set his glass of iced water on it. The glass being nearly empty the beetle was walking away with it, and with Alaric’s attention at the same time. Chum stopped abruptly.