Then for the first time I saw lying on it a piece of paper torn from a pocketbook and addressed to myself. I seized and read it. It ran thus:
“The merciful Lord has sent me a vision of Inez and shown me where she is over the cliff-edge away to the west, also the road to her. In my sleep I heard her talking to me. She told me that she is in great danger—that they are going to marry her to some brute—and called to me to come at once and save her; yes, and to come alone without saying anything to anyone. So I am going at once. Don’t be frightened or trouble about me. All will be well, all will be quite well. I will tell you the rest when we meet.”
Horrorstruck I translated this insane screed to Umslopogaas and Hans. The former nodded gravely.
“Did I not tell you that he was talking with his Spirit, Macumazahn?” (I had rendered “the merciful Lord” as the Good Spirit.) “Well, he has gone and doubtless his Spirit will take care of him. It is finished.”
“At any rate we cannot, Baas,” broke in Hans, who I think feared that I might send him out to look for Robertson. “I can follow most spoors, but not on such a night as this when one could cut the blackness into lumps and build a wall of it.”
“Yes,” I answered, “he has gone and nothing can be done at present,” though to myself I reflected that probably he had not gone far and would be found when the moon rose, or at any rate on the following morning.
Still I was most uneasy about the man who, as I had noted for a long while, was losing his balance more and more. The shock of the barbarous and dreadful slaughter of his half-breed children and of the abduction of Inez by these grim, man-eating savages began the business, and I think that it was increased and accentuated by his sudden conversion to complete temperance after years of heavy drinking.
When I persuaded him to this course I was very proud of myself, thinking that I had done a clever thing, but now I was not so sure. Perhaps it would have been better if he had continued to drink something, at any rate for a while, but the trouble is that in such cases there is generally no half-way house. A man, or still more a woman, given to this frailty either turns aggressively sober or remains very drunken. At any rate, even if I had made a mess of it, I had acted for the best and could not blame myself.