‘Trimblerigg’s,’ said the man.
‘I’m Trimblerigg’s sister.’
After that he treated her as though she were royalty—a little puzzled, however, not quite understanding her. Her dry ironic commendations were thrown away on him; he was the plain blunt man, doing his job honestly according to the light or darkness with which others provided him.
The information she got from him decided Davidina not to stay the night. The natives, it appeared, had a wonderful faculty for moving invisibly and without sound in the darkness; so in that camp throats were sometimes found cut in the morning; and Davidina wished rather particularly not to come to that end before she had seen Jonathan.
She spent the rest of that night and the whole day following in a canoe rowed by picked Christian natives; the two other members of the expedition going back under an escort to recover what could be saved of the impedimenta and botanical specimens which they had been forced to abandon.
Late the next evening she arrived ahead of rumour at the armed camp of the central mission. Off the river’s landing-stage she met some one she knew who directed her to Mr. Trimblerigg’s quarters. ‘I think he has turned in. Shall I call him?’ he asked.
‘I’ll call him myself,’ she replied, ‘if you don’t mind. It will be a nice little surprise for him.’
He gave her the necessary password through the lines, for the camp was well guarded, double sentries everywhere.
The coming of a white woman seemed to startle them, being so much less explainable than a ghost; but she and her monkey got through. Coming to a window covered by a chick-blind and showing no light, she lifted the blind and looked in.