He had had too many narrow escapes to wish to risk anything more. He was wandering between the fringes of two rival armies and the prospect was uninviting. He feared potential enemies; there were potential enemies everywhere; and as he sat and rested he shook his head. It was the thought that he was doing what the other messengers had failed to do which was the most disconcerting thing to him.
Why had the others not done what they had undertaken to do? All the time that he rested this thought recurred to him with ever greater force. Perhaps there was some secret reason; they knew something he did not know. Suspicion began to gain him; for suspicion is the twin-brother of fear and the twain can never be long separated.
He had been weak to accept—he ought to have refused. There were plenty of his fellow-countrymen with the advancing army who could have been ordered to do the same work. To go one way was all right—it had been right for him to obey his master and go for succour. But to come back: to do the thing twice—no....
He looked to the right—he looked to the left; and angrily he rose and hitched his trousers higher and tightened his belt. The sun had gone down behind the mountains now, and the perspiration which had covered his body had fully dried. Two hours more and it would be pitch-dark again—long shadows were even now creeping into the mountain hollows and making them seem blue-black.
He began to feel lonely at the prospect of another night in the fields.
Yet he started off, wondering how he would dare to go through the gates of the capital on the morrow. For the capital was not more than a dozen miles away; it could not be more than that. Soon he would be able to see the outline of the city walls.
Onward he went now passing patches growing Indian corn; for the soil had become too arid for anything else to grow. There was no one about in the fields since the harvest was still far off; and this loneliness preyed on him more and more.
Onward and onward he went in the oncoming dusk. Then, just below the shoulder of the hill which he was rounding, he saw something which did not belong to the landscape. Presently he made out quite clearly a little knot of people. They seemed to him to be standing motionless, as if something chained them to the spot—as if something had caused them to become inanimate. That at once attracted his attention.
Cautiously he approached, keeping near a large patch of Indian corn into which he could run if there were any indications of hostility. But nobody turned, nobody paid the slightest attention to him. Fifteen or twenty people were standing there in a circle gazing at something fixedly.
He approached so noiselessly that only when he was a short distance away was his presence noticed. Then his small, slight person caused a commotion and several commenced to run away. Only when they saw that it was only a boy did their strange panic subside.