After a while he commenced picking out the tunes of comic songs, and before long chanced on one that somebody in the front part of the train recognized and began to sing.  In ten minutes after that he was playing accompaniments for a full train chorus and the seared zebra and impala bolted to right and left, pursued by Tarara-boom-de-ay, Ting-a-ling-a-ling, and other non-Homeric dirges that in those days were dying an all-too-lingering death.

It was to the tune of After the Ball that the engine dipped head-foremost into a dry watercourse, and brought the train to a jaw-jarring halt.  The tune went on, and the song grew louder, for nobody was killed and the English-speaking races have a code, containing rules of conduct much more stringent than the Law of the Medes and Persians.  Somebody—­probably natives from a long way off, who needed fuel to cook a meal—­had chopped out the hard-wood plate on which the beams of a temporary culvert rested.  Time, white ants, gravity and luck had done the rest.  It was a case thereafter of walk or wait.

“Didn’t I tell you?” moaned Brown of Lumbwa.  “Didn’t I say walkin’ ’ud be only just my luck?”

So we walked, and reached Nairobi a long way ahead of Coutlass and his gang, whose shoes, among other matters, pinched them; and we were comfortably quartered in the one hotel several hours before the arrival of Lady Saffren Waldon and those folk who elected to wait for the breakdown gang and the relief train.

It was a tired hotel, conducted by a tired once-missionary person, just as Nairobi itself was a tired-looking township of small parallel roofs of unpainted corrugated iron, with one main street more than a mile long and perhaps a dozen side-streets varying in length from fifty feet to half a mile.

He must have been a very tired surveyor who pitched on that site and marked it as railway headquarters on his map.  He could have gone on and found within five miles two or three sightlier, healthier spots.  But doubtless the day’s march had been a long one, and perhaps he had fever, and was cross.  At any rate, there stood Nairobi, with its “tin-town” for the railway underlings, its “tin” sheds for the repair shops, its big “tin” station buildings, and its string of pleasant-looking bungalows on the only high ground, where the government nabobs lived.

The hotel was in the middle of the main street, a square frame building with a veranda in front and its laundry hanging out behind.  Nairobi being a young place, with all Africa in which to spread, town plots were large, and as a matter of fact the sensation in our corner room was of being in a wilderness—­until we considered the board partition.  Having marched fastest we obtained the best room and the only bath, but next-door neighbors could hear our conversation as easily as if there had been no division at all.  However, as it happened, neither Coutlass and his gang nor Lady Saffren Waldon and her maid were put next to us on either side.  To our right were three Poles, to our left a Jew and a German, and we carried on a whispered conversation without much risk.