So Kep promised to meet this officer next day, meanwhile going as far with him as the British Consulate, for everything bordering on suspicion must be avoided. The Arabs even then might be watching.
Kep then returned to his home, and thinking that something terrible had happened, for it was now long past eleven, the Arab had sat up for him with little Zeena, who was on the ottoman weeping when the lad entered.
He had to tell all his story now with the girl on his knee.
Bungle sat thinking.
"He is one devil," he said at last.
"Who are you talking about, Bungle?"
"About de wicked Chief Abdularram."
"From what I heard him say that night in the jungle," returned Kep, "he is not one devil, but a thousand devils rolled into one."
The Marten was busy coaling next forenoon, but men were allowed on shore after twelve o'clock, and when the liberty boat returned at six o'clock from the shore two of them were missing. Very early next morning a party of marines, under the charge of a sergeant, landed to hunt these men up.
They found them at last, or rather they found their dead bodies. The poor fellows had been inveigled into a compound, some little way off one of the main streets, and then stabbed to the heart, and their faces frightfully gashed and mutilated. They had not been robbed. Both men possessed watches and had money also, but nothing had been abstracted. It was a cases of revenge pure and simple. Not that the Arab perpetrators had borne any personal grudge against these men. They were Britishers, that was all.