Japp lost colour and his lip trembled. “I swear to God, Mr Crawfurd, I’ve been doing nothing wrong. I’ve kept the promise I gave you like an oath to my mother. I see you suspect me, and maybe you’ve cause, but I’ll be quite honest with you. I have dealt in diamonds before this with Hendricks. But to-day, when he asked me, I told him that that business was off. I only took him to my room to give him a drink. He likes brandy, and there’s no supply in the shop.” I distrusted Japp wholeheartedly enough, but I was convinced that in this case he spoke the truth. “Had the man any news?” I asked. “He had and he hadn’t,” said Japp. “He was always a sullen beggar, and never spoke much. But he said one queer thing. He asked me if I was going to retire, and when I told him ‘yes,’ he said I had put it off rather long. I told him I was as healthy as I ever was, and he laughed in his dirty Portugoose way. ‘Yes, Mr Japp,’ he says, ‘but the country is not so healthy.’ I wonder what the chap meant. He’ll be dead of blackwater before many months, to judge by his eyes.” This talk satisfied me about Japp, who was clearly in desperate fear of offending me, and disinclined to return for the present to his old ways. But I think the rest of the afternoon was the most wretched time in my existence. It was as plain as daylight that we were in for some grave trouble, trouble to which I believed that I alone held any kind of clue. I had a pile of evidence—the visit of Henriques was the last bit—which pointed to some great secret approaching its disclosure. I thought that that disclosure meant blood and ruin. But I knew nothing definite. If the commander of a British army had come to me then and there and offered help, I could have done nothing, only asked him to wait like me. The peril, whatever it was, did not threaten me only, though I and Wardlaw and Japp might be the first to suffer; but I had a terrible feeling that I alone could do something to ward it off, and just what that something was I could not tell. I was horribly afraid, not only of unknown death, but of my impotence to play any manly part. I was alone, knowing too much and yet too little, and there was no chance of help under the broad sky. I cursed myself for not writing to Aitken at Lourenco Marques weeks before. He had promised to come up, and he was the kind of man who kept his word.