"Ay, ay, sir," concurred the Acting Chief without enthusiasm. He had no love for the Portuguese East African ports. A long spell there meant mosquitoes; mosquitoes meant malaria and other evils in its train. And there was simply nothing to see or do in these ports. Preston had "had some" before to-day. "They give no reason for the alteration, sir?" he inquired. "I suppose by any chance we haven't got the signal incorrectly?" "No reason, Mr. Preston," replied Captain Bullock. "And here is the signal in duplicate. Mostyn took that precaution, so I can stake my boots on its accuracy." The two officers spent some time in poring over the chart and reading up the description of Bulonga harbour and its approaches, as set down in the Admiralty sailing directions for the east coast of Africa. "It'll be a tight squeeze for our draught," commented the skipper. "It'll mean a Portugee pilot, worse luck. I know those gentry of old. I hope there's a British agent there to take over the Brocklington Company's consignment." Had Captain Bullock known that Peter was down with a severe bout of malaria he would not have wagered his footgear so readily, for Mostyn had made a mistake in taking in the signal. More, he had duplicated the mistake when he received the repetition at his own request. With his head buzzing like a high-pressure boiler Peter had read D (--..) for B (--...), his temporarily disordered sense of hearing failing to detect the slight but important difference. Consequently, instead of the _West Barbican_ shaping a course for Rangoon, which in the code signal appeared as AELB, she was making for the comparatively unimportant harbour of Bulonga (AELD). The while Ludwig Schoeffer's seven-day watch was silently ticking out the seconds, minutes, and hours in the _West Barbican's_ baggage hold. The German agent was sublimely ignorant of the change in the ship's plans. He was still at Durban, awaiting the news that the _West Barbican_ was overdue and believed missing. He would have been considerably surprised had he known that there was every likelihood of the ship sinking in Bulonga Harbour, where at low tide she would have barely enough water to lie alongside the quays. If he had only known the vital difference that the omission of a "dot" in the spurious signal was to cause! CHAPTER XIX Peter's Progress Peter Mostyn's attack lasted a full twenty-four hours, but at seven the next evening he felt well enough to go down to dinner in the saloon. That function had become a mere shadow of its former self. On the run to Cape Town the chairs round the long tables were generally filled, once the passengers had grown accustomed to life afloat and had regained their temporarily lost appetites.