“I wonder how you know these things,” said Olga, watching him.

“What?  I don’t know ’em of course.  I’m only assuming,” said Noel.  “I only play about on the surface, as it were, and draw my own conclusions as to the depths.  It’s quite a fascinating game, and nobody’s any the worse or the wiser.”

“And you think Kobad Shikan untrustworthy?” questioned Olga.

“My dear girl, could anyone with any sense whatever think him anything else?  Could he have run the show for so many years if he had been anything less than a crafty old schemer?  Oh, you bet he hasn’t been Prime Minister and Lord High Treasurer all this time for nothing.  What does Nick think of him?”

“Nick never discusses any of them.”  Olga was considerably astonished by these revelations.  “I thought it was fairly plain sailing,” she said.

“Did you though?  Well, Nick is a genius, as everyone knows.  He is probably in the thick of everything, and knows all that goes on.  He’ll be a C.S.I. before he’s done.”

“Oh, do you think so?” said Olga, with shining eyes.

“Rather!  It’s pretty evident.  You wait till old Reggie comes along, and ask him.  He is a great backer of Nick’s.  So am I,” said Noel modestly.  “I’d back him against all the Kobad Shikans in the Empire.”

This, as Noel had doubtless foreseen, proved a fruitful topic of conversation and lasted them during a considerable part of their drive.  Nearly the whole of the way lay through the jungle, here and there narrowing to little more than a track over which great forest-trees stretched their boughs.  It was all new country to Olga, and the quiet, sunless depths as they advanced, held her awe-struck, spellbound.  She gazed into the thick undergrowth with half-fearful curiosity.  Once, at a sudden loud flapping of wings, she started and changed colour.

“There must be so many wild things there,” she said.

“Teeming with ’em,” said Noel.  “We’ve come along at a rattling pace.  Shall we pull up and wait for the rest to turn up?”

But Olga did not want to linger on the jungle-road.  “Besides we’ve got most of the provisions,” she pointed out.  “And I want to get things arranged a little before anyone comes.”

They pressed on, therefore, past glades, obscure and gloomy, where the flying-foxes hung in branches from the trees, and the little striped squirrels leaped and scuttled from bough to bough, where the blue jays laughed with abandoned mirth and the parroquets squabbled unceasingly, and cunning monkey-faces peered forth, grimaced, and vanished.

“This place is full of critics,” declared Noel.  “Can’t you feel the nasty remarks they’re making?”

Olga laughed and slightly shivered.  “It isn’t a very genial atmosphere, is it?  But I think we must be nearly there.  Doesn’t that look like a break in the trees ahead?”

She was right.  They were coming to a clearing in the jungle.  Gradually it opened before them.  The trees gave place to shrubs, and the shrubs to tall kutcha-grass which Olga viewed with deep suspicion.