“Who sent you here with that filthy stuff?” he asked sternly. “You'd best answer me.”
The Kru boy, shrinking away from the dark muzzle of that motionless revolver, was spellbound with fear. He shook his head.
There was a flash of light, a puff of smoke, a loud report. The Kru boy fell forward upon his face howling with fear. Monty ran off towards the house mumbling to himself.
“The next time,” Trent said coolly, “I shall fire at you instead of at the tree. Remember I have lived out here and I know all about you and your kind. You can understand me very well if you choose, and you've just got to. Who sends you here with that vile stuff?”
“Massa, I tell! Massa Oom Sam, he send me!”
“Hamburgh gin, massa! very good liquor! Please, massa, point him pistol the other way.”
Trent took up the flask, smelt its contents and threw it away with a little exclamation of disgust.
“How often have you been coming here on this errand?” he asked sternly.
“Most every day, massa--when him Mr. Price away.”
“Very good,” he said. “Now listen to me. If ever I catch you round here again or anywhere else on such an errand, I'll shoot you like a dog. Now be off.”
The boy bounded away with a broad grin of relief. Trent walked up to the house and asked for the missionary's wife. She came to him soon, in what was called the parlour. A frail, anaemic-looking woman with tired eyes and weary expression.
“I'm sorry to trouble you, Mrs. Price,” Trent said, plunging at once into his subject, “but I want to speak to you about this old man, Monty. You've had him some time now, haven't you?”
“About four years,” she answered. “Captain Francis left him with my husband; I believe he found him in one of the villages inland, a prisoner.”
“He left you a little money with him, I believe.”
“It was very little,” she said, “but such as it is, we have never touched it. He eats scarcely anything and we consider that the little work he has done has about paid us for keeping him.”
“Did you know,” Trent asked bluntly, “that he had been a drunkard?”
“Captain Francis hinted as much,” the woman answered. “That was one reason why he wanted to leave him with us. He knew that we did not allow anything in the house.”
“It was a pity,” Trent said, “that you could not have watched him a little more out of it. Why, his brain is sodden with drink now!”