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She nodded thanks, expecting him to dismiss her with some conventionality. But he stayed there, his gaze upon a rubbery weed at the base of the steps, his mind heaven knew where.

Her next words came rapidly: “Julian, until I go you must let me help. You must! It was my fault that Roger walked out, and I’d feel so much less badly about it if you’d let me do his job—the shipping part of it, anyway. I’m sure I could tackle it—I used to deputize for Nigel when he was sick. Please, Julian!”

Close as she was, he did not look at her. “The shipping is taken care of,” he said, “and I can handle the clerical work myself, in the evenings. I’ve cabled Lagos offering Crawford’s post to a man who approached me while I was there. If he accepts, he’ll be here within a week, so Drew and I won’t have to sweat off our hides for long.”

“Oh.” Deflated, she moved away. “Well, I’d like you to know that I’m cured of fighting for my own way. I’ll do whatever you wish.”

A pause. Then he said: “Don’t reproach yourself over Crawford. The climate and conditions had more to do with cracking him up than your turning him down. You never encouraged him, did you?”

“We were friendly when you first came.”

“How friendly?”

Uneasy under his probing, she said: “You know how it was. We were both young . . . and foolish.”

“You kissed?” Mercilessly, he emphasized the implication she strove to avoid. “You’re certainly making the rounds. There’s no need to wince—you’re fortunate to have got away with just kisses.” He put on the helmet and dipped his hands into his breeches pockets. “Experience is ageing, isn’t it? I expect you feel all of eighteen and a bit and completely jaded. Don’t let it get you. In a year’s time you’ll be laughing at this. Goodbye.”

Had she needed it, the brief exchange was further proof of his hostility. When they were together the whole atmosphere became loaded with it, and any pleasure she might have gained from his proximity was swamped in the urge to escape his bitter tongue.

There was nothing for her to do but waste the days till the
Bassington
or some other ship with passenger accommodation put into the harbour.

PHIL was resting. All morning she had lifted the seedling shrubs and trees in her small garden and set them in old oil and paint tins, ready for planting out in Matt’s weed-grown plot. A tricky business in this heat, but Manoela prophesied rain, and the roots had reached a convenient size for transplanting. Now, spent with heat and exertion, she lay half-clothed on her bed and watched a lizard which had retreated from the oppressive outdoors and fastened itself to the window-frame. It seemed a long, long time since she had last experienced a good spell of oblivion. Manoela brought a tea-tray.

“Is it four already?” Phil asked languidly.

“Nearly four, missus. I bring tea early. Please, I want to go to the store.”

‘To buy more shoes, Manoela?”

“No, missus.” The servant had lost a tooth and her smile was uncanny. “I am sick in the stomach. I buy medicine.”

“Haven’t you been taking the salts?”

“They no good, missus. My stomach want white pills.”

“What sort of white pills?”

“Boy at the store—he know. I go now, missus.”

Phil swung down her legs and drank her cup of tea. A faint coolness drifted over her bare skin and she thought how agreeable it would be to lie on a beach where the breeze was strong and the sea washed in icy foam about one’s body. Soon she would be able to do that, but nothing was so pleasurable in practice as in anticipation. Perhaps pain also had its limits. She hoped so.

Automatically she shook out her mules and trod into them, but she made no further move till Manoela sped past the window, her headcloth flying and guttural vituperation streaming from her mouth. Phil opened the door.

“Manoela! Come here.”

She approached, still panting, her shaking hands rewinding the scarf about her head.

“Tell me what you’ve been doing.”

“Nothing, missus,” A swallow and a gasp, “I run very fast. There was trouble this morning—the boy at the store and more boys. White master say he kill . . .”

Phil gathered that the drug leakage had been traced and forcible methods used to stop it. Natives who had expended much of their wages on dagga had been searched and their hoards confiscated. The whole waterfront was in an uproar, and Julian was in the thick of it.

She conquered a sudden sick trembling, reached up to a hook for her shorts and pulled them on. Manoela flopped forward into the room and crashed shut the door.

“They come! They will stab us!”

Phil dashed to the window. Yes, there were half a dozen natives in front of Julian’s house, and squirming in their hold was Sam, the houseboy. They tied the boy, dragged him into the trees and ran back to the house. Did they intend to ransack the place and then set fire to it? What could she do against a bunch of maddened Africans? “Listen, Manoela. You, too, can use a knife. Crawl out and find Sam, and release him. Tell him to fetch the white master.” Manoela moaned and dragged herself upright. Dully she peered at the deserted clearing, and without speaking she went to the door and crept out, doubled like a stalking chimpanzee. Phil buttoned her shirt and went back to the window. The stillness filled her with premonitory horror, so that she had to struggle with an impulse to scream in order to start some action. She had no gun, no weapon of any sort.

Presently her breath caught hard in her windpipe. The natives were appearing, one by one, sidling with almost imperceptible motion across Julian’s veranda and dropping over the rail. She counted them. Eight altogether . . . no, nine. Why had the interval between the eighth and ninth stretched so long? Had the last one been entrusted with the task of igniting paraffin-drenched rags?

The naked brown backs had vanished. Phil ran out, vaulted her fence and raced over the grass and up to Julian’s living-room. There she stopped dead, bewildered by the normal atmosphere. Nothing unusual here. The bedroom door was locked, so that the main room must be the scene of whatever harm had been hatched.

Phil came back to examine the desk, and on the floor just below the knee-hole she saw a tiny ball of flame. A seemingly innocuous globule of light at one end of a waxed string whose other end was buried in an untidy little paper packet. Simultaneously with a stab of shock her slipper dropped on to the minute flame. A crude explosive. There might be others!

Frantically she dragged out chairs and searched under the cabinet and bookcase. Another of the fiendish things concealed within a pile of magazines on a table, with the string only two inches to go. A third on the floor by the inner wall, this one even nearer to the deadline.

She dared not stay any longer. She wheeled, caught sight of a frightening glow at the left of the door and flung herself towards the opening. With a thunderous crack the wall split and cascaded.

A steamy drizzle was Julian’s chief ally in getting the natives back to their huts. The waterfront was quiet in the early dusk. The sea, backing into a purple wall, was decreasingly visible through the grey veil of rain. Boat lights appeared, a spatter of brassy stars suspended above the waves.

Julian said: “This weather will keep them indoors; the police should manage for the remainder of the night. Go home and get some sleep, Drew. We may have another heavy day tomorrow.”

“If you’re sure you don’t need me any longer?” The overseer’s plain features looked inexpressibly weary.

“Absolutely. You’ve done well—I'll put it in my report.”

‘Thank you, sir. Good night.”

Julian would have offered Drew a lift, but his car had been parked behind the store for safety, and from this point the man was half-way home. Julian strode swiftly up the track, and as he climbed, Matt’s burly figure materialized, tented in oilskins.

“I’ve been hunting for you,” the trader grunted. “Your day’s not ended yet, Julian. The devils have had a go at your house.”

“D’you mean they’ve fired it?” came the swift demand. “Where’s Phil?”

“Give me time, will you? Phil’s girl, Manoela, came snivelling into my yard fifteen minutes ago. Seems that Phil watched a gang get rid of your boy and sent Manoela out to free him. The girl said she was combing the trees when she heard a loud bang. She ran back and saw the front wall of your house had collapsed. Manoela was so terrified that she hid in the forest and didn’t budge till it began to rain. She went back to the cabin, but it was empty, so she came down here.”

“What time did it happen?”

“A couple of hours ago—about four-thirty.”

“No sign of Phil since then?”

“She’s got the sense to hide, and anyway, she knows how to use a gun.”

“She hasn’t owned a gun since hers was lost,” said Julian crisply. “Are you coming, Matt?”

He leapt the final yard or two of the ascent and ran. Within minutes Matt, his complexion a mottled red and his lungs bursting, was sprawled beside him in the car, as it rocketed up the trail to the clearing.

The car beams illuminated the log buildings, every one of them intact, and switched full on to the expanse of rubble which covered the veranda and half the living-room of the house.

Matt used an oath. “Explosive! Where did the beggars get it?”

“It might have been worse,” snapped Julian. “But where the hell is Phil?”

He tripped over the prone form of Sam—poor Sam, his wrists and ankles raw from the tight grass-rope—and chased to the cabin. He lit the lamp and surveyed the dented bed, the tea-tray, a silk wrap over the back of a chair. Peremptory with anxiety, he called her name and was answered by an echo.

Outside he collided with Matt.

“No signs?” growled the trader. “She’s probably close by, laughing at us.”

“Unless she was unwise enough to show herself before they’d gone. She may be unconscious somewhere. Got a flashlight?”

“A small one.”

“There are a couple in my desk. Wait. I’ll fetch them.”

He sprang over the boulders of wattle and daub, crossed the room to the desk in the comer and extracted the torches. To his touch the lamp felt wholes and he struck another match and set it to the wick. Couldn’t have too much light in this murk. The torches went into his pockets and he grabbed the lamp by its copper base, and held it aloft, ready for the sprint back over the rain-soaked debris.

For a moment the lamp stayed poised; then it was lowered to a slab of plaster, and Julian sank to his haunches, his face as grey as the wreckage. From a mound of fragments protruded a tress of dusty hair.

The paralysis passed. He barked at Matt and began quickly and gently to uncover the bright head. Her cheek was cold and bruised; the pitifully thin silk shirt had given no protection to the slim shoulders. Thank God she was lying on her front. Julian could have smashed a fist into Matt’s swearing mouth as the trader assisted him. Instead, he went on removing chunk after chunk till he could push fingers under her and feel the moth-wing beat of her heart.

Shakily, Matt said: “She’s tough. I’ll get some brandy ready.”

“And then go up to the mission and bring back the doctor. Tell Sam to boil water—plenty of it.”

Carefully he turned her and moved her farther into the room. She was ashen to the lips, her eyelids dark, her lines sharp as death. He unlocked his bedroom and brought out his mattress and blankets. Too risky to lift her on to a bed. He loosened the waist of her shorts and the neck of her shirt, got her on to the mattress and covered her closely.

For want of anything more pungent, he doused a handkerchief with brandy and wiped her nostrils and mouth with it. From a wad of cotton wool he squeezed neat brandy over her teeth, and in a few minutes he got results: a wrenching shudder and a heart-freezing moan.

“Phil,” he whispered, bending over her. “Phil.”

Her lids flickered wide. After a lengthy stare at him she breathed, “They didn’t.. . hurt you?”

It was the humblest moment in Julian’s life. He shook his head and placed his lips to her forehead.

Sam brought coffee and a can of water, and Julian bathed her face and hands and arms. But when he raised her and held a cup to her lips she gasped and her nails drew blood from his forearm.

“Maybe you’ve damaged a rib,” he said, hoping to God that might be all. “Don’t talk. The doctor will be here soon to fix you up.”

She lay back, her eyes closed again, a heavy sweat gathering at her temples.

“Will you . . . stay with me, Julian?”

“Of course,” he said thickly. “Of course.”

THE effects of the morphia were diminishing. The pearl-grey walls floated, performed a mad little dance and righted themselves. It was not so much a room as a prison, a large, airy cell with dawn filtering through the mana mat which screened the high window. The sheets were very white, the blanket mud-brown with a red stripe.

Someone got up from a chair and stood above her. A middle-aged, white-clad nurse with a tropic-weary smile.

“Awake? That’s good. You don’t look too bad, my dear.”

“You’re new . . . aren’t you?” Phil managed.

“New? Gracious, no! I’ve been here off and on for fifteen years. Shall we have a little drink?”

Phil waited while the nurse opened a cupboard and liquids gurgled. The spout of a feeding-cup loomed before her nose and she tried to recoil.

“You mustn’t mind this, child. It’s only for a week or so, till we can give you two pillows. That’s right. Drink it up.” Patiently she held the cup while Phil sipped. “People often say queer things when they first come round. What made you think I’m new here?”

“I thought you’d be Sister Harrington.”

“And who’s Sister Harrington, for goodness’ sake?”

The commonplace voice jarred Phil, and she was too tired to speak much. “The Valeira mission,” she answered.

“Bless you, this isn’t Valeira. You’re on the coast now, at Goanda Hospital. I’m Nurse Briggs. Mr. Caswell brought you here on the niftiest stretcher you ever saw. He’d kept you under on the boat with injections. Which reminds me. He made me promise to tell him the minute you stirred. Had enough, dear? Good.”