“Because,” said I, “they wouldn’t go.  They’d turn around and paddle for Kisumu, to file complaint against us.”

“Don’t you suppose,” suggested Will, “that Schillingschen’s own men ’ud insist on going home?  Out on the water, ten to one, without guns or too much food, they wouldn’t have the same fear of him they had formerly.”

“That chance is too broad and long and deep,” said Fred.  “Altogether too bulky to be taken.  Let’s sleep on it.  This cigar’s done, and I’m drowsy.  Are you quite sure Schillingschen’s hands are fast behind him?  Then good night, all!”

The problem looked no easier next morning, with Schillingschen recovered sufficiently to be hungry and sit up.  There was a look in his eye of smoldering courage and assurance that did not bode well for us, and when we untwisted the iron wire from his wrists to let him wash himself and eat he looked about him with a sort of quick-fire cunning that belied his story of headache.

He was much too astute a customer to be judged superficially.  I whispered to Fred not to shackle him again too soon, and sat near and watched him, close enough for real safety, yet not so close that he might not venture to try tricks.  He said nothing whatever, but I noticed that his eye, after roving around the tent, kept returning again and again to a chop-box that stood near the foot of the bed.

Now I had unpacked that chop-box and repacked it the previous night.  I knew everything it contained—­exactly how many cans of plum pudding.  It was the box I had rested my feet on.  I felt perfectly sure he knew as well as I what the box contained, and to suppose he would sit there planning to recover canned food, however dainty, was ridiculous.

Wherefore it was a safe conclusion he was trying to deceive me as to his real intention.  I put my foot on the box again, and he frowned, as much as to say I had forestalled his only hope.  Pretending to watch the box and him, I examined every detail of the tent, particularly that side of it opposite the box, away from where it seemed he wanted me to look.

The human eye is a highly imperfect piece of mechanism and the human brain is mostly grayish slush.  It was minutes before I detected the edge of his diary, sticking out from the pocket of Fred’s shooting coat that itself protruded from under the folded blanket on which Fred had slept.  It was nearer to Schillingschen than to me.  After watching him for about fifteen minutes, during which he made a great fuss about his headache, I was quite sure it was the diary that interested him.

I stooped and extracted it from the coat pocket.  The grimace he made was certainly not due to headache.

“Fred!” I called out, and he and Will came striding in together.

“That diary’s the key,” I said.  “It’s important.  It holds his secrets!”

Will was swift to put that to the test.

“What will you offer?” he asked Schillingschen.  “We want you to go back direct to German East.  Will you go, if we give you back your diary?”