There are three European products which you shall invariably find—even if you find no other—on the confines of civilisation and beyond the same: “square face” gin, a pack of cards, and a bottle of Worcester sauce. The first of these Bully now produced, together with some enamelled metal mugs.
“Here’s luck all round,” he said. “Eh? What’s that? Water? Man—Wyvern, but you’re a bit of a Johnny Raw in these parts. Why we don’t water our stuff here. Eh, Joe?”
“Matter of taste. For my part I don’t care either way,” was the answer—while the host put his head out and bellowed to the women to fetch some.
Now Joe Fleetwood, though one of the shrewdest and most practical of men, had “instincts”—and these were somehow unaccountably aroused. There was a something which warned him that their uproariously effusive host meant mischief, and that at no distant time. Therefore he resolved to keep more than one eye upon him.
Soon they strolled down to the wood-cutting place, and the sombre, surrounding forest was ringing with the sound of axe and saw. The wretched slaves—for practically they were little or nothing else—looked up with dull interest at the new arrivals, but their master, out of deference to Wyvern, omitted to kick or hammer any of them, and laid himself out to be extremely pleasant in his boisterous way, as he explained the arrangements while they strolled around.
“Hold hard, Wyvern. A snake’s bitten me.”
The words—quick, sharp, replete with alarm—were Fleetwood’s. Wyvern, who was just in front of him, stopped dead in his tracks and turned, as with a mighty crash a nearly-cut through tree-trunk came to earth hardly more than a yard in front of him. His next step would have been his last.
“Blazes!” cried Bully Rawson, “but I never thought that log would have come down at all. I was just shoving against it to see how much more cutting through it wanted. What’s that about a snake, Joe?”
“No. It isn’t one,” said that worthy, in a tranquil tone of voice as he looked down. “It’s only a thorn dug into my ankle. I was bitten once, and I suppose it’s made me nervous ever since. Which is lucky, or you’d have been squashed to pulp, Wyvern.”