“Are you then crazed, mother?” he said. “You see that I am alone here with one servant, for my three companions, of whom the people in the kraal told you, are dead through fever, and I myself am smitten with it. And yet you ask me, alone as I am, to travel to this slave-trader’s camp that is you know not where, and there, single-handed, to rescue your mistress, if indeed you have a mistress, and your tale is true. Are you then mad, mother?”
“No, Lord, I am not mad, and that which I tell you is true, every word of it. I know that I ask a great thing, but I know also that you Englishmen can do great things when you are well paid. Strive to help me and you shall have your reward. Ay, should you fail, and live, I can still give you a reward; not much perhaps, but more than you have ever earned.”
“Never mind the reward now, mother,” broke in Leonard testily, for the veiled sarcasm of Soa’s speech had stung him, “unless, indeed, you can cure me of the fever,” he added with a laugh.
“I can do that,” she answered quietly; “to-morrow morning I will cure you.”
“So much the better,” he said, with an incredulous smile. “And now of your wisdom tell me how am I to look for your mistress, to say nothing of rescuing her, when I do not know whither she has been taken? Probably this Nest of which the Portugee talked is a secret place. How long has she been carried off?”
“This will be the twelfth day, Lord. As for the Nest, it is secret; that I have discovered. It is to your wisdom that I look to find it.”
Leonard mused awhile, then a thought struck him. Turning to the dwarf, who had been sitting by listening to all that was said in stolid silence, his great head resting upon his knees, he spoke to him in Dutch:
“Otter, were you not once taken as a slave?”
“Yes, Baas, once, ten years ago.”
“How was it?”