'Yes, I think so, but...'
'She's got lots of firewood.' Dick was not as easy as he pretended, but he resented his host's interference, 'and there's not a hope of finding our way down in the dark. It's nearly vertical in parts, and I'm not sure of the way. Even in the daylight we'll have to wait for my "boy" to guide us.'
'Well, she's your wife, not mine,' said Smith, prompted possibly by some attendant angel with a taste for Greek irony.
As if to dismiss the matter, he reached out and offered Dick a cigarette. The metal of the case caught Dick's eye as he accepted, for elephant hunters do not, as a rule, sport gold, and curiosity impelled him to decipher the words engraved inside. The fire had sunk to a glow, but the sardonic-minded angel, anxious to see the fun, whispered to the stranger to kick the smouldering logs, and a tongue of flame licked high enough for Dick to read the words 'Archie from Norah' followed by a date that his retina had not recorded, ere the light had sunk.
There shot through Dick's being a fear as luminous as that arrow of fire and as quickly sped. Of course, even in the small white circle of Central Africa there must be lots of men named 'Archie,' who were given things by women called 'Norah.' Why should not Smith's Christian name be Archie? 'Archie Smith,' a perfectly convincing combination.
He could not help recalling with faint uneasiness that suspicion of mockery when the stranger declared his name. Had he been given a Roland for his Oliver, a Smith for his Brown?
But, even if his name were not Smith, why should it be Sinclair? Archie Sinclair, who was hundreds of miles away 'on cattle business,' presumably at Elizabethville.
With a start he realised that his host had asked him a question. Intent on the problem of the man's identity, he chanced assent, and was relieved when the answer proved adequate.
Of course the fellow might have found or even stolen the case. It certainly was not natural for a hunter to possess such an article ... if he were an elephant hunter. He was up to the knees in a morass of uncertainties; there seemed no bottom to the mystery; but until he was on firm ground, exhausted as he was, he knew he would not sleep. How could he get at the truth? One couldn't very well say to a man, 'I say, Smith, is your name Sinclair? Because, if so, I'm sleeping with your wife.' Nor could he interrogate natives in their master's presence.
Whatever happened, he must escape from this morose tête-à-tête, whose suppressions were driving him to idiocy. Conversation, he felt, would choke him; without it solution was no nearer. He rose to his feet with a gesture of weariness that was not assumed.