For this was what Denton was doing. My arrival seemed to have interrupted him in the middle of narrative. He shook my hand in a strong, silent sort of way, and resumed:
“Well, the natives seemed fairly friendly, so I decided to stay the night.”
I made a mental note never to seem fairly friendly to an explorer. If you do, he always decides to stay the night.
“In the morning they took me down to the river. At this point it widens into a kongo, or pool, and it was here, they told me, that the crocodile mostly lived, subsisting on the native oxen—the short-horned jongos—which, swept away by the current while crossing the ford above, were carried down on the longos, or rapids. It was not, however, till the second evening that I managed to catch sight of his ugly snout above the surface. I waited around, and on the third day I saw him suddenly come out of the water and heave his whole length on to a sandbank in midstream and go to sleep in the sun. He was certainly a monster—fully thirty—you have never been in Central Africa, have you, Miss Weston? No? You ought to go there!—fully fifty feet from tip to tail. There he lay, glistening. I shall never forget the sight.”
He broke off to light a cigarette. I heard Betty draw in her breath sharply. Mortimer was beaming through his glasses with the air of the owner of a dog which is astonishing a drawing-room with its clever tricks.
“And what did you do then, Mr. Denton?” asked Betty, breathlessly.
“Yes, what did you do then, old chap?” said Mortimer.
Denton blew out the match and dropped it on the ashtray.
“Eh? Oh,” he said, carelessly, “I swam across and shot him.”
“Swam across and shot him!”
“Yes. It seemed to me that the chance was too good to be missed. Of course, I might have had a pot at him from the bank, but the chances were I wouldn’t have hit him in a vital place. So I swam across to the sandbank, put the muzzle of my gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. I have rarely seen a crocodile so taken aback.”
“But how dreadfully dangerous!”
“Oh, danger!” Eddie Denton laughed lightly. “One drops into the habit of taking a few risks out there, you know. Talking of danger, the time when things really did look a little nasty was when the wounded gongo cornered me in a narrow tongo and I only had a pocketknife with everything in it broken except the corkscrew and the thing for taking stones out of horses’ hoofs. It was like this—”
I could bear no more. I am a tenderhearted man, and I made some excuse and got away. From the expression on the girl’s face I could see that it was only a question of days before she gave her heart to this romantic newcomer.
As a matter of fact, it was on the following afternoon that she called on me and told me that the worst had happened. I had known her from a child, you understand, and she always confided her troubles to me.
“I want your advice,” she began. “I’m so wretched!”
She burst into tears. I could see the poor girl was in a highly nervous condition, so I did my best to calm her by describing how I had once done the long hole in four. My friends tell me that there is no finer soporific, and it seemed as though they may be right, for presently, just as I had reached the point where I laid my approach-putt dead from a distance of fifteen feet, she became quieter. She dried her eyes, yawned once or twice, and looked at me bravely.
“I love Eddie Denton!” she said.
“I feared as much. When did you feel this coming on?”
“It crashed on me like a thunderbolt last night after dinner. We were walking in the garden, and he was just telling me how he had been bitten by a poisonous zongo, when I seemed to go all giddy. When I came to myself I was in Eddie’s arms. His face was pressed against mine, and he was gargling.”
“Gargling?”
“I thought so at first. But he reassured me. He was merely speaking in one of the lesser-known dialects of the Walla-Walla natives of Eastern Uganda, into which he always drops in moments of great emotion. He soon recovered sufficiently to give me a rough translation, and then I knew that he loved me. He kissed me. I kissed him. We kissed each other.”
“And where was Mortimer all this while?”
“Indoors, cataloguing his collection of vases.”
For a moment, I confess, I was inclined to abandon Mortimer’s cause. A man, I felt, who could stay indoors cataloguing vases while his fiancée wandered in the moonlight with explorers deserved all that was coming to him. I overcame the feeling.
“Have you told him?”
“Of course not.”
“You don’t think it might be of interest to him?”
“How can I tell him? It would break his heart. I am awfully fond of Mortimer. So is Eddie. We would both die rather than do anything to hurt him. Eddie is the soul of honour. He agrees with me that Mortimer must never know.”
“Then you aren’t going to break off your engagement?”
“I couldn’t. Eddie feels the same. He says that, unless something can be done, he will say goodbye to me and creep far, far away to some distant desert, and there, in the great stillness, broken only by the cry of the prowling yongo, try to forget.”
“When you say ‘unless something can be done,’ what do you mean? What can be done?”
“I thought you might have something to suggest. Don’t you think it possible that somehow Mortimer might take it
