"Ah," said Dom Clemente with incisive quietness, "I once informed you that it seemed to me you were doing a perilous thing in going back to Africa. It is possible you will shortly realize that what I said was warranted."
Then he turned and went out, and Ormsgill sat down again with a little gasp, for the tension of the last few minutes had been almost insupportable.
CHAPTER XXXI
ON HIS TRIAL
Several hours had passed since Dom Clemente left Ormsgill's quarters when he sat with one of his staff under a lamp in a room of the fazienda. He had laid his kepi on the table, and leaned back in his chair looking at a strip of paper with a little grim smile in his eyes. A negro swathed in white cotton squatted against the wall watching him uneasily, and a black soldier who had led the man in stood with ordered rifle at the door. At length Dom Clemente tossed the paper across to the officer sitting opposite him.
"I should be glad of your opinion," he said.
"It is discreet," said his companion, who examined the paper carefully. "The writer evidently foresaw the possibility of his message falling into the wrong hands. It is also indifferent Portuguese, but I think it is the writing of an educated man."
"Exactly! The question is why should an educated man express himself in that fashion?"
The officer shook his head. "That," he said reflectively, "is a thing I do not understand."
Dom Clemente smiled a little, and took up another strip of paper. "This," he said, "is a message of the same kind which has also fallen into my hands. Does anything else occur to you when you put the two together?"