It was the last straw, so far as Mr Gobbitt was concerned. “They have swindled me out of twelve hundred pounds,” he groaned, fanning himself with his handkerchief the while; then a thought struck him. “You have the numbers of the notes? You can trace them?”
The manager looked doubtful. “Some, perhaps. We will do our best. Come in again to-morrow, Mr Gobbitt. Meanwhile, if I were you, I should say nothing, and stay indoors. You need rest.”
In the morning, the merchant found the bank manager very cold and distant in his manner. “We have traced several of the notes,” he said. “In each case they have come from most questionable places—places of no repute, in fact. I presume you have witnesses to prove where you were that night.”
“I was in my room at the hotel. I went to bed very early, as I was starting early next morning.”
“Ah!” There was no mistaking the tone. “So no one saw you after dinner. That is a pity.”
Mr Gobbitt brought his hand down on the table with a thump. “Do you mean to insinuate, sir, that I myself passed those notes at those infamous places? Never in my life”—he had forgotten Igut—“never in my life was I in one.”
“I mean to insinuate nothing,” the manager answered wearily. “Only you cannot prove that you were not out, and, if you make a fuss, the Commissioners will quickly prove that you were. They will get police, native officials, and perhaps even a native judge or two, to remember having met you. You can do nothing, and I can do nothing, and, if you will excuse me, I am very busy. Good-morning.”
Basil Hayle spent several hours in drawing up a report concerning Mr Gobbitt, the head-hunters, and Felizardo, then he read it through again, and straightway destroyed it.
“The less said, the better,” he muttered. “They’ll never believe anything to the old man’s credit, and they might shift me over it.”
So, instead of sending the report, he marched out by night to the head-hunters’ village, hoping to catch them there; but only found the ashes of the houses, and had one of his men wounded by a spear thrown in the darkness. Then he went back to his stockade at Silang, where he sat down, and thought of Felizardo and of Captain Bush, and most of all of Mrs Bush, and cursed at the dreary inaction, and prayed that the ladrones would come along and give him a fight.