“This job has grown. There has got to be a fourth in it, and the fourth must be a man.—You understand?”
The speaker, who was known as the Colonel, took the cigar he was smoking from his mouth the better to emphasise his words, and looked gravely into the serious faces of his audience. It comprised a man of middle-age, bearded, secretive, calculating; and one other. The other was little more than a boy. By profession he was a mining engineer, by disposition a scamp, ready to plunge into any undertaking that promised adventure. The boy’s head was bandaged where recently it had been broken for him, and he sat very quiet and silent, which was unusual; as the Colonel was wont to remark, he frequently talked too much. But he was not proud of his broken head and its consequences, so he held his peace.
“Do either of you know of a man likely to suit? He must be possessed of a good nerve and a none too tender conscience. He’ll have to put himself outside the law—the business is outside the law. And he must be a man we can trust.”
The Colonel looked sharply from one to the other of his listeners, but neither answered. The young engineer was sulkily examining his finger-nails, displaying the same air of detachment that he had shown throughout. He had received so severe a reprimand over the affair of his broken head that he had felt strongly tempted to sever his connection with the Colonel. Only that spirit of adventure that had led him into it, and an unnatural greed of gain, prevented him from cutting the concern.
“I want a man with grit,” the Colonel said slowly. “There must be plenty such men in Africa, if I could only put my hand on one.”
As he paused the older man looked up suddenly. Something in the Colonel’s speech had jerked into his mind a name he had almost forgotten.
“I knew a man once,” he said, and hesitated because he was not quite sure whether his knowledge of the man justified a recommendation. The acquaintance had been of the slightest; his opinion of his character was based more upon hearsay than deduction, but he believed it was not at fault.
“Well?”
The Colonel threw in the interjection with sharp impatience, and the other added briefly:
“He might not be sufficiently discreet. I know little of him... I did him a service once.”
“What are his qualifications for this job?” the Colonel asked, passing over the half-implied doubt as to discretion. “Let us get hold of facts; we can deal with surmises later.”
“Your saying you wanted a man with grit brought him to my mind,—that’s what the fellows called him—Grit. And, upon my word! though I suppose I’ve heard his real name, I can remember him by no other. Nobody ever called him anything else. He was a lean chap, with an ugly scar down one side of his face. I met him first up in Rhodesia. He was mining then. But I saw him recently in Cape Town.”
“How did he earn the name of Grit?” the Colonel inquired, showing an increasing interest; and the boy left off biting his nails and looked up with a half-resentful scowl, as if jealous of the unknown man’s qualifications for a mission he knew his chief would not entrust to him.
“I don’t know whether he earned it on a particular occasion, or if it was only a general recognition of the chap’s pluck. They said of him at the mines that he was a man who did not know fear.”
“Pshaw?” The Colonel struck the arm of his chair i