Olcott was passing and he stopped beside them.
"Murray seems to be moralizing," he laughed. "I must warn you that he spends his evenings in Africa sitting behind a mosquito-netting studying the early Victorian philosophers. It's some excuse for him that when the niggers are quiet he has nothing else to do and nobody to talk to except a colored official."
"Don't you get any newspapers?" Ethel asked.
"They're often too wet and pulpy to read, and now and then the sporting natives bag the mail-carrier. I've known them try to stalk the white officer responsible for too drastic reforms."
Ethel regarded Murray with heightened interest. There was something that both amused and touched her in the thought of the lonely man, shut in by the black, steamy forest, spending his evenings reading philosophy.
"I wonder," she said, "whether you find any practical application of the great thinkers' theories?"
"One old favorite of mine strikes me as rather grim and singularly hard to please; but so far as I can judge, he hits the mark now and then. It's a pet theme of his that only that which stands on justice, and is better than what it displaces, can endure. You see that worked out in a primitive country like West Africa."
"But isn't the progress of civilization assisted by machine-guns and followed by gin?"
"A fair shot!" laughed Olcott. "Our rule's often faulty, but it's a good deal better than the natives had before. Murray knows a creek that mutilated corpses used to drift down after each big palaver and celebration of Ju-Ju rites."
"I suppose he had some trouble in putting a stop to it?"