Vlacho smiled broadly.
‘We could not distress her with such a silly tale,’ he answered; and he leant down towards me. ‘Nobody has heard the message but the Lord Constantine and one man he told it to. And nobody will. If that old woman spoke, she—well, she knows and will not speak.’
‘And you back up this murderer?’ I cried.
‘Murderer?’ he repeated questioningly. ‘Indeed, sir, it was an accident done in hot blood. It was the old man’s fault, because he tried to sell the island.’
‘He did sell the island,’ I corrected; ‘and a good many other people will hear of what happened to him.’
He looked at me again, smiling.
‘If you shouted it in the hearing of every man in Neopalia, what would they do?’ he asked scornfully.
‘Well, I should hope,’ I returned, ‘that they’d hang Constantine to the tallest tree you’ve got here.’
‘They would do this,’ he said with a nod; and he began to sing softly the chant I had heard the night before.