“Don’t go, please.” Half command, in the same imperious tone I was getting to know well; but unmistakably also half entreaty. It was the note I had been waiting for so eagerly, and I felt myself go hot with pleasure. She did trust me.
“As you wish,” I answered. “But I had better go.”
There was a pause, and then she said, in a quiet level tone:
“You must do as you think best, of course.”
“Chris here will answer for your safety. Try and eat something,” I said; and with that I ran back again to the tent.
In a moment I saw something was wrong. My four men were clustered near the fellow whose leg I had broken, quarrelling angrily, with many gestures; while the man I had made prisoner was not in the tent at all.
“Where’s the other man?” I asked.
They all turned at the sound of my voice, and one of them, with whom I had before had some bother, took the question to himself. He shrugged his broad shoulders, first scowled, and then laughed insolently.
“He’s escaped,” he said, his tone a mixture of doggedness and defiance.
The trouble I had been looking for had come, just when it was most unwelcome.