Druro, entirely taken aback by her decisive retort and action, stood staring long after she had disappeared.
"Well, by the living something or other!" he muttered at last, and walked away from the hotel, filled with wholesale rage and indignation. "The little shrew! Who asked her to take me, I wonder? Or for her opinions on my ways of living? Of all the cheeky monkeys! Pitching into me like that--just because she missed her blessed waltz! _Certainly_ it was rotten of me--I don't say it wasn't. _But I forgot_. I _told_ her I forgot. Didn't I come straight down here and tell her? Left those fellows--left a jack-pot! O my aunt! And that's all I get for it--a decent and reasonable fellow like me to be called such names just because I distract myself with the only one or two things that can delude one into believing that life is worth living in this rotten country! Drunkard and gambler--fine words to fling at a man like bomb-shells!"
Thus it was with Druro, whom all men hailed as "well-met," and all women liked, and all Rhodesia called "Lundi," though his Christian names were really Francis Everard. No one had ever called him anything but Lundi since the day he jumped into the Lundi River to save his dog's life. He was on a shoot with half a dozen other men, and they had heavily dynamited a portion of the river to bring up some fresh fish for dinner. Druro's dog, thinking it was a game he knew, jumped in after one of the sticks of dynamite to bring it out to his master, and Druro, like a flash, was in after him and out again, just in time to save himself and the dog from being blown to smithereens. "The bravest action he had ever seen in his life," one of the witnesses described it--and he had been through several native wars and knew what he was talking about, just as Druro, who was a mining expert, knew the risk he was taking when he jumped in among the dynamite.
This was the man who was filled with rage and desolation of heart at the words of "a little monkey of eighteen or nineteen--old dissipated Derek Liscannon's daughter, I thank you! Nice school to come to for temperance lectures! Not that she can help being Derry's daughter, and not that old Derry is a bad sort--far from it--but as hard a drinker as you could find in a day's march. And young Derry hits it up a bit, too, though one of the nicest boys in the world. I've always said that Gay was the sweetest, prettiest little kid in Rhodesia--in Africa, if it comes to that--and now she turns on me like this--blow her buttons!"