As April drew closer day by day, Mary anxiously waited for the Mission Board’s answer.  The Mission Board wrote to Mary: 

We are sending John Rankin to look over the field where you have been working.  After he has made his report we will decide what you should do.

Mr. Rankin visited the different places in cannibal land where Mary had started congregations.  He talked with the chiefs and the people.  One chief talking about Mary and the other women missionaries said, “Them women be the best men for the mission.”  He wrote to the Board: 

Close to Arochuku, within a circle of less than three miles in diameter, there are nineteen large towns.  I visited sixteen of these.  Each of them is larger than Creek Town.  Most of the people are anxious to help.  Already many of them have begun to live in God’s way.  Even the head chief of all the Aros wants us to do mission work in his country.  He told the other chiefs he is going to rule according to God’s way.  He wants missionaries to be sent to his people.  He offers to build a house at Arochuku for any missionary who will come.

The Mission Board was thrilled when they read this report.  They agreed to give the money for the work which Mary had planned.  They appointed Rankin to take charge of the stations at Itu and Arochuku.  They agreed to let Mary go into the new territory.  She did not have to go back to Akpap.

This made Mary very happy.  Now she could work full time among the Ibibios.  She offered to pay for the building of a mission station among the Ibibios if there was no money in the homeland treasury.  In May the government appointed Mary to take charge of the courts in the Ibibio district as she had done in Okoyong.  It paid her for this work so now she had money to carry on her mission work whether the Board paid her or not.

Court was held at Ikotobong.  Three chiefs and a jury helped Mary in trying the cases, but Mary’s word was law.  Mary was fair and kind, but at the same time she saw to it that those who did bad things were punished.  In a letter to a friend she wrote: 

God help those poor helpless women.  They are treated worse than animals.  Today I had a crowd of people.  How wicked they were!  I have had a murder, a poison bean case, a suicide, a man branding his slave wife all over her face and body, a man with a gun who shot four people.  It is all horrible.

But her work as judge did not stop her from doing her mission work.  Everywhere she went she told the natives of Jesus’ death for them.  She opened schools and churches for natives.  She also was thinking about the other missionaries.  She planned a place for them where they could spend weekends or where they could rest when they were getting over sickness.  She chose a place half-way between Itu and Ikotobong on Enyong Creek.  It was high above the lowlands where most of the sickness was.  A friend sent her a check for $100 and Mary used it as a start for this rest home.  She had the ground cleared and a small English house built.