They washed in the open air, sluicing themselves from buckets, and dressed again in clean dungarees in another hut.

“Skoff (food) ’ll be ready by now,” said Mills; “but I think a gargle’s the first thing.  You’ll have whisky, or gin?”

The Frenchman pronounced for whisky, and took it neat.  Mills stared.

“If I took off a dose like that,” he observed, “I should be as drunk as an owl.  You know how to shift it!”

“Eh?”

“Gimme patience,” prayed the trader.  “You bleat like a yowe.  I said you can take it, the drink.  Savvy?  Wena poosa meningi sterrik.  Have some more?”

“Oh yais,” smiled the guest.  “Ver’ good w’isky, eh?”

He tossed off another four fingers of the liquor, and they sat down to their meal.  The food was such as most tables in Manicaland offered.  Everything was tinned, and the menu ran the gamut of edibles from roast capon (cold) to pate de foie gras in a pot.  When they had finished Mills passed over his tobacco and sat back.  He watched the other light up and blow a white cloud, and then spoke.

“Look here, Frenchy,” he said, looking at him steadily; “I don’t quite cotton to you, and I think it proper you should say a bit more than you have said.”

“Eh!” queried the other, smiling.

Mills glowered, but restrained himself.  “I want to know who you are, and I guess I mean to know too, so out with it!”

“Ah yais,” replied the Frenchman, and removed his pipe from his mouth.  He trimmed the bowl fastidiously with his thumb, smiling the while.  Of a sudden he looked up, and the smile was gone.  He gave Mills back a look as purposeful as his own.

“I’m the man that save’ you in the river,” he said meaningly.

“Well,” began the trader hotly, but stopped.

“That’s true,” he answered thoughtfully, as though speaking to himself.  “Yes, that’s true.  You’ve got me, Frenchy.”

“Yais,” went on the Frenchman, leaning forward across the table, and speaking with an emphasis that was like an insult.  “You sink there in the sand.  I stop and save you.  I stop, you see, although the men from Macequece coom after me and want to kill me.”

“But I don’ run away; I don’ say to you, ‘I can’ stop.  You go down; you die.’  I don’ say that.  I stop.  I save you.  An’ now you say to me, ’Frenchy, ’oo the ‘ell are you?’ Yais.”

Mills shrugged protestingly.  The appeal was to the core of his nature; the demand was one he could not dishonor.

“I didn’t say just that,” he urged.  “But what are the chaps from Macequece after you for?”

“Tha’s all right,” replied the Frenchman with a wave of his hand.  “You say, ‘Frenchy, I don’ like you.  Dam’ you, Frenchy!’ Ver’ well.  The men coom, you give me to them.  They shoot me.  Tha’s all right; yais!”

He replaced his pipe and commenced again to smoke with an expression of weary indifference.