“It was,” Oom Sam said, “veree wonderful. The natives who were chasing you, they found him and then the Englishman whom you met in Bekwando on his way inland, he rescued him. You see that little white house with a flagstaff yonder?”
He pointed to a little one-storey building about a mile away along the coast. Trent nodded.
“That is,” Oom Sam said, “a station of the Basle Mission and old Monty is there. You can go and see him any time you like, but he will not know you.”
“Is he as far gone as that?” Trent asked slowly.
“His mind,” Oom Sam said, “is gone. One little flickering spark of life goes on. A day! a week! who can tell how long?”
“Has he a doctor?” Trent asked.
“The missionary, he is a medical man,” Oom Sam explained. “Yet he is long past the art of medicine.”
It seemed to Trent, turning at that moment to relight his cigar, that a look of subtle intelligence was flashed from one to the other of the brothers. He paused with the match in his fingers, puzzled, suspicious, anxious. So there was some scheme hatched already between these precious pair! It was time indeed that he had come.
“There was something else I wanted to ask,” he said a moment or two later. “What about the man Francis. Has he been heard of lately?”
Oom Sam shook his head.