But Slingsby was right. Each letter under its simple and foolish excuses was a prayer for translation to a less dangerous place. For as the days passed and no answer was vouchsafed, the prayer became a real cry of fear.
"I claim to be sent to England without any delay. I must be sent," he wrote frankly and frantically.
Slingsby set his teeth with a grim satisfaction.
"No, my friend, you shall stay while the danger lasts. If it's a year, if you are alone in the camp, still you shall stay. The horrors you have planned you shall share with every man, woman and child in the town."
We were in this horrible and strange predicament. The whole colony was menaced, and from the Lines to Europa Point only two men knew of the peril. Of those two, one, in an office down by the harbour, ceaselessly and vainly, with a dreadful anxiety, asked "When?" The other, the prisoner, knew the very hour and minute of the catastrophe, and waited for it with the sinking fear of a criminal awaiting the fixed moment of his execution.
Thus another week passed.
Slingsby became a thing of broken nerves. If you shut the door noisily he cursed; if you came in noiselessly he cursed yet louder, and one evening he reached the stage when the sunset gun made him jump.
"That's enough," I said sternly. "To-day is Saturday. To-morrow we borrow the car"--there is only one worth talking about on the Rock--"and we drive out."
"I can't do it," he cried.
I continued: