A fortnight afterwards Trent rode into Attra, pale, gaunt, and hollow-eyed.

The whole history of those days would never be known by another man! Upon Trent they had left their mark for ever.

Every hour of his time in this country he reckoned of great value--yet he had devoted fourteen days to saving the life of John Francis.

Such days too--and such nights! They had carried him sometimes in a dead stupor, sometimes a raving madman, along a wild bush-track across rivers and swamps into the town of Garba, where years ago a Congo trader, who had made a fortune, had built a little white-washed hospital! He was safe now, but surely never a man before had walked so near the "Valley of the Shadow of Death." A single moment's vigilance relaxed, a blanket displaced, a dose of brandy forgotten, and Trent might have walked this life a multi-millionaire, a peer, a little god amongst his fellows, freed for ever from all anxiety.

But Francis was tended as never a man was tended before.