'You must take my bed,' said the putative Smith, moved again by the Spirit with a taste for double entendre.
He escorted Dick to the tent and left him there while he went to give orders for his own bed of leaves. Once alone, no pedantic delicacy restrained Dick. With the flair of a private detective, he found a handkerchief. Granted a good wife, this might solve the question. But the emblem 'A.S.' that rewarded his search and testified to a modicum of wifely devotion, only reduced the field to Archies, Sinclair or Smith.
It was not until he thought of looking under the bed that the myth of the latter's existence was exploded. There lay an old uniform case which its owner had preserved from army days. Painted on it, he read, '2nd Lieut. Archibald Sinclair, R.F.A.'"
CHAPTER II
After the manner of men in love, Dick seems to have enjoyed discussing his emotions with Norah. So, building on what she told me, I can reconstruct in some degree his feelings on that remarkable evening.
It appears that even the culminating evidence of the uniform case did not satisfy him, so reluctant is homo sapiens to admit unwelcome truth. He wanted to know more. How could Archie be here? There was not time for him to have gone back to the farm, to have found Norah's letter, and followed. To catch them, a pursuer would have had to overtake before the Mimi was boarded—the only boat that called at the Rhodesian end of the lake.
But what about that wandering 'stiff' who, he remembered Norah saying, had started for the Congo with her husband. Might not this be he? Suppose he had stolen Sinclair's kit at Elizabethville and was making for an East Coast port?
Dick's reluctance to look truth in the eye was removed by Archie's return to the tent, where a couch of leaves had been heaped. One of the grunts, with which he settled himself, matured into more or less coherent speech, 'By the way, sorry ... my name's not Smith ... Sinclair.... Thought I ought to tell you.... Good-night.'
Even a purist when hit on the head with a hammer ceases to argue whether coal or sledge. Dick was reduced to accepting facts at face value.