“That’s not up to me! You’re the man that’s got to make good!” was Blake’s retort.
“But you’ll give me the chance?” half pleaded his prisoner.
“Sure!” replied Blake, as they rode on again. He was wondering how many more miles of hell he would have to ride through before he could rest. He felt that he would like to sleep for days, for weeks, without any thought of where to-morrow would find him or the next day would bring him.
It was late that day as they climbed up out of a steaming valley into higher ground that Binhart pulled up and studied Blake’s face.
“Jim, you look like a sick man to me!” he declared. He said it without exultation; but there was a new and less passive timber to his voice.
“I’ve been feeling kind o’ mean this last day or two,” confessed Blake. His own once guttural voice was plaintive, as he spoke. It was almost a quavering whine.
“Hadn’t we better lay up for a few days?” suggested Binhart.
“Lay up nothing!” cried Blake, and he clenched that determination by an outburst of blasphemous anger. But he secretly took great doses of quinin and drank much native liquor. He fought against a mental lassitude which he could not comprehend. Never before had that ample machinery of the body failed him in an emergency. Never before had he known an illness that a swallow or two of brandy and a night’s rest could not scatter to the four winds. It bewildered him to find his once capable frame rebelling against its tasks. It left him dazed, as though he had been confronted by the sudden and gratuitous treachery of a life-long servant.
He grew more irritable, more fanciful. He changed guides at the next native village, fearing that Binhart might have grown too intimate with the old ones. He was swayed by an ever-increasing fear of intrigues. He coerced his flagging will into a feverish watchfulness. He became more arbitrary in his movements and exactions. When the chance came, he purchased a repeating Lee-Enfield rifle, which he packed across his sweating back on the trail and slept with under his arm at night. When a morning came when he was too weak and ill to get up, he lay back on his grass couch, with his rifle across his knees, watching Binhart, always watching Binhart.
He seemed to realize that his power was slipping away, and he brooded on some plan for holding his prisoner, on any plan, no matter what it might cost.