and breakfast with me?"

The Englishman, a surveyor from a London office, assented with
enthusiasm.

"I can't offer to put you up," he said gloomily. "Living out here's
beastly. See you in the morning, then."

He strolled away, fanning himself. Trent lit a long cigar.

"I understand," he said turning to Oom Sam, "that old Monty is alive
still. If so, it's little short of a miracle, for I left him with
scarcely a gasp in his body, and I was nearly done myself.

"It was," Oom Sam said, "veree wonderful. The natives who were chasing
you, they found him and then the Englishman whom you met in Bekwando on
his way inland, he rescued him. You see that little white house with a
flagstaff yonder?"

He pointed to a little one-storey building about a mile away along the
coast. Trent nodded.

"That is," Oom Sam said, "a station of the Basle Mission and old Monty
is there. You can go and see him any time you like, but he will not know
you."

"Is he as far gone as that?" Trent asked slowly.

"His mind," Oom Sam said, "is gone. One little flickering spark of life
goes on. A day! a week! who can tell how long?"

"Has he a doctor?" Trent asked.

"The missionary, he is a medical man," Oom Sam explained. "Yet he is
long past the art of medicine."

It seemed to Trent, turning at that moment to relight his cigar, that
a look of subtle intelligence was flashed from one to the other of the
brothers. He paused with the match in his fingers, puzzled, suspicious,
anxious. So there was some scheme hatched already between these precious
pair! It was time indeed that he had come.

"There was something else I wanted to ask," he said a moment or two
later. "What about the man Francis. Has he been heard of lately?"

Oom Sam shook his head.

"Ten months ago," he answered, "a trader from Lulabulu reported having
passed him on his way to the interior. He spoke of visiting Sugbaroo,
another country beyond. If he ventured there, he will surely never
return."

Trent set down his glass without a word, and called to some Kru boys in
the square who carried litters.

"I am going," he said, "to find Monty."

CHAPTER XXIV

An old man, with his face turned to the sea, was making a weary attempt
at digging upon a small potato patch. The blaze of the tropical sun had
become lost an hour or so before in a strange, grey mist, rising not
from the sea, but from the swamps which lay here and there--brilliant,
verdant patches of poison and