But the cause of the trouble--the propinquity of civilized man--was also the way out of it. Shouldering what they could of the things most necessary to life, and striking the downward course of the Ray River--here a baby stream, shallow and fordable,--they headed toward civilization. Toward the end of the second day they came upon the sun-dried bodies of six natives planted head-downwards in the soil: their withered limbs trained upright on stakes, their dark leathery trunks still showing the scores of stripes borne by the flesh. Davidina had been, for over a year, so far removed from civilization, that she did not know the latest things that civilization in its military necessities had been doing; nor had she at that time any clue for connecting this unsightly object-lesson with the pacific and missionary efforts of her brother Jonathan. But that night, coming into a white camp, well fenced and armed--offshoot of the larger expedition now actively out to impose peace by reprisals--she got the situation fully explained. On the same spot where she had seen the impaled natives, a lay-missioner a few weeks earlier had been found dead from the same causes. ‘This time we only managed to catch six,’ explained the commandant; ‘our regulation number is twenty.’ ‘Regulation number is good,’ was her tart comment. ‘It suggests order and discipline. Do you reduce the number as you go on; or do you increase it?’ ‘Increasing isn’t much good,’ replied her informant. ‘These beggars can only count up to ten. We chose twenty as a good working average: it’s the number we can generally manage to bag if we butt in quick enough.’ ‘But a higher scale,’ said Davidina, ‘would give you a better clearance: rid you of more dangerous characters.’ ‘Not necessarily. The dangerous ones can run. We only get what’s left.’ ‘You are acting strictly to order, I suppose? Whose?’ ‘Trimblerigg’s,’ said the man. ‘I’m Trimblerigg’s sister.’ After that he treated her as though she were royalty--a little puzzled, however, not quite understanding her. Her dry ironic commendations were thrown away on him; he was the plain blunt man, doing his job honestly according to the light or darkness with which others provided him. The information she got from him decided Davidina not to stay the night. The natives, it appeared, had a wonderful faculty for moving invisibly and without sound in the darkness; so in that camp throats were sometimes found cut in the morning; and Davidina wished rather particularly not to come to that end before she had seen Jonathan. She spent the rest of that night and the whole day following in a canoe rowed by picked Christian natives; the two other members of the expedition going back under an escort to recover what could be saved of the impedimenta and botanical specimens which they had been forced to abandon.