Monty fell back speechless. There was a sudden change in his face. Trent, who had seen men die before, let go his hand and turned away without any visible emotion. Then he drew himself straight, and set his teeth hard together.
“I'm going to get out of this,” he said to himself slowly and with fierce emphasis. “I'm not for dying and I won't die!”
He stumbled on a few steps, a little black snake crept out of its bed of mud, and looked at him with yellow eyes protruding from its upraised head. He kicked it savagely away—a crumpled, shapeless mass. It was a piece of brutality typical of the man. Ahead he fancied that the air was clearer—the fetid mists less choking—in the deep night-silence a few hours back he had fancied that he had heard the faint thunder of the sea. If this were indeed so, it would be but a short distance now to the end of his journey. With dull, glazed eyes and clenched hands, he reeled on. A sort of stupor had laid hold of him, but through it all his brain was working, and he kept steadily to a fixed course. Was it the sea in his ears, he wondered, that long, monotonous rolling of sound, and there were lights before his eyes—the lights of Buckomari, or the lights of death!
They found him an hour or two later unconscious, but alive, on the outskirts of the village.
Three days later two men were seated face to face in a long wooden house, the largest and most important in Buckomari village.
Smoking a corn-cob pipe and showing in his face but few marks of the terrible days through which he had passed was Scarlett Trent—opposite to him was Hiram Da Souza, the capitalist of the region. The Jew—of Da Souza's nationality it was impossible to have any doubt—was coarse and large of his type, he wore soiled linen clothes and was smoking a black cigar. On the little finger of each hand, thickly encrusted with dirt, was a diamond ring, on his thick, protruding lips a complacent smile. The concession, already soiled and dog-eared, was spread out before them.
It was Da Souza who did most of the talking. Trent indeed had the appearance of a man only indirectly interested in the proceedings.
“You see, my dear sir,” Da Souza was saying, “this little concession of yours is, after all, a very risky business. These niggers have absolutely no sense honour. Do I not know it—alas—to my cost?”
Trent listened in contemptuous silence. Da Souza had made a fortune trading fiery rum on the Congo and had probably done more to debauch the niggers he spoke of so bitterly than any man in Africa.
“The Bekwando people have a bad name—very bad name. As for any sense of commercial honour—my dear Trent, one might as well expect diamonds to spring up like mushrooms under our feet.”