Alive! Monty alive! The impossibility of the thing came like a flash of relief to him.

The man was surely on the threshold of death when he had left him, and the age of miracles was past.
"You're talking like a fool, Da Souza.

Do you mean to take me in with an old woman's story like that ?" "There's no old woman's story about what I've told you," Da Souza snarled.

"The man's alive and I can prove it a dozen times over.

You were a fool and a bungler." Trent thought of the night when he had crept back into the bush and had found no trace of Monty, and gradually there rose up before him a lurid possibility Da Souza's story was true.