"All based upon my personal observation and experience," said Bones triumphantly--"not a single tip from anybody."
"I think you are really marvellous, Bones," said the girl, and meant it.
Henry Hamilton Bones sat upright in a wooden cot. A fat-faced atom of brown humanity, bald-headed and big-eyed, he sucked his thumb and stared at the visitor, and from the visitor to Bones.
Bones he regarded with an intelligent interest which dissolved into a fat chuckle of sheer delight.
"Isn't it--isn't it simply extraordinary?" demanded Bones ecstatically. "In all your long an' painful experience, dear old friend an' co-worker,Designer Handbags, have you ever seen anything like it? When you remember that babies don't open their eyes until three weeks after they're born----"
"Da!" said Henry Hamilton Bones.
"Da yourself, Henry!" squawked his foster-father.
"Do da!" said Henry.
The smile vanished from Bones's face, and he bit his lip thoughtfully.
"Do da!" he repeated. "Let me see, what is 'do da'?"
"Do da!" roared Henry.
"Dear old Miss Hamilton," he said gently, "I don't know whether Henry wants a drink or whether he has a pain in his stomach, but I think that we had better leave him in more experienced hands."
He nodded fiercely to the native woman nurse and made his exit.
Outside they heard Henry's lusty yell,UGG Clerance, and Bones put his hand to his ear and listened with a strained expression on his face.
Presently the tension passed.
"It _was_ a drink," said Bones. "Excuse me whilst I make a note." He pulled out his pocket-book and wrote: "'Do da' means 'child wants drink.'"
He walked back to the Residency with her, giving her a remarkable insight into Henry's vocabulary. It appeared that babies have a language of their own, which Bones boasted that he had almost mastered.
She lay awake for a very long time that night, thinking of Bones, his simplicity and his lovableness. She thought, too, of Sanders, grave,fake uggs boots, aloof, and a little shy, and wondered....
She woke with a start, to hear the voice of Bones outside the window. She felt sure that something had happened to Henry. Then she heard Sanders and her brother speaking, and realized that it was not Henry they were discussing.
She looked at her watch--it was three o'clock.
"I was foolish to trust that fellow," Sanders was saying, "and I know that Bosambo is not to blame,knockoff handbags, because he has always given a very wide berth to the Kulumbini people, though they live on his border."
She heard him speak in a strange tongue to some unknown fourth, and guessed that a spy of the Government had come in during the night.
"We'll get away as quickly as we can, Bones," Sanders said. "We can take our chance with the lower river in the dark; it will be daylight before we reach the bad shoals. You need not come, Hamilton."
"Do you think Bones will be able to do all you want?" Hamilton's tone was dubious.
"Pull yourself together, dear old officer," said Bones, raising his voice to an insubordinate pitch.
She heard the men move from the verandah, and fell asleep again, wondering who was the man they spoke of and what mischief he had been brewing.
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