“We couldn’t leave a nigger behind to starve--and I am cursed if we haven’t left a white man,” he said, and swore horribly. “Don’t do it--don’t say it,” implored Lambaire, raising his big hand in protest; “we couldn’t--we couldn’t do what we did ... you know ... what we did to the madman.... Be sensible, Whitey ... he’s dead.” Three days later they reached an outlying mission station, and a heliograph message carried the news of their arrival to a wandering district commissioner, who was “working” a country so flat that heliographic communication was not possible with the coast. But he had a basket full of carrier pigeons. * * * * * Three weeks’ rest, soft beds to lie upon, Christian food to eat, and the use of a razor, make all the difference in the world to men of Lambaire’s type. He had a convenient memory. He forgot things easily. There came to the mission station a small keen-faced man in khaki, the redoubtable Commissioner Sanders, who asked questions, but in view of the debilitated condition of the mission guests did not press for information. He heard without surprise that the River of Stars had been discovered,--he gathered from the vague description the men gave him of the locality where the discovery had been made that the new diamond field was in British territory--he was disappointed but did not show it. For no man charged with the well-being of native peoples welcomes the discovery of precious stones or metal in his dominion. Such wealth means wars and the upheaval of new forces. It means the end of a regular condition, and the super-imposition of a hasty civilization. There have been critics who asked why the Commissioner then and there did not demand a view of the specimens that Lambaire and his confederate brought from the mythical mine. But Sanders, as I have explained elsewhere, was a simple man who had never been troubled with the administration of a mineralized region, and frankly had no knowledge as to what a man ought to do in the circumstances. “When did Sutton die?” he asked, and they told him. “Where?” Here they were at fault, for the spot indicated was a hundred miles inland. Sanders made a rapid calculation. “It must be nearer than that,” he said. “You could not have marched to the mission station in the time.” They admitted possibility of error and Sanders accepted the admission, having some experience in the unreliability of starved men’s memory. He questioned the carriers, and they were no more explicit. “Master,” said the headman, speaking in the riverian dialect, “it was at a place where there are four trees all growing together, two being of camwood and one of copal.” Since the forests of the Alebi are mainly composed of camwood and gum, the Commissioner was no wiser. A fortnight after this conversation, Lambaire and Whitey reached the little coast town where Sanders had his headquarters. CHAPTER XIV A HANDFUL O’ PEBBLE