Four days thus went by, Verna was despairing, her father gloomy. To the latter she had now confided Denham’s story; they had arranged between them that this should be done in the event of certain contingencies. Ben Halse came to the conclusion that this rather tied his hands, for to advertise the disappearance would be to draw too much attention to a man who had every reason for avoiding it.
It was night. Verna stood in the open door looking forth. A faint snore now and again from another room told that her father had subsided into obliviousness, but to-night she herself could not sleep; indeed, but for the sheer physical exhaustion of the day she would never have been able to sleep at all. The soft velvet of the sky was afire with stars, and above the dismal howl of prowling hyenas would now and again rise the distant song and roar of savage revelry from some kraal far out on the plain beneath. Back in the sombre recesses of the mountains weird, indescribable sounds, disguised by echo, the voices of bird or beast would ring forth, or a falling star dart, in trailing spark, through the zenith. Suddenly another sound fell upon her ear. Somebody was approaching the house.
All the blood ran tingling through her frame. She listened—listened hard. Footsteps! Alaric had returned. He should find her there, waiting. But the glow of intense thankfulness sank in her heart. But for the one obsessing idea she would have recognised that those soft-padded footfalls were not those of any white man.
She advanced a few steps out into the gloom and called softly. A figure came into sight indistinctly. Even then her heart throbbed to bursting. This nocturnal visitor must be the bearer of news. But he had halted. She must go towards him.
“And the news?” she said, speaking quickly.
“If the Nkosazana would hear of him who was missing,” was the answer, “she must go to the chief’s kraal alone. This movement must be known to nobody, not even to U’ Ben. Otherwise she would never see or hear of the missing one again.”
All further attempts at questioning the nocturnal visitant met with no reply. He had delivered the ‘word’ of the chief, and had nothing to add to it. Only—the Nkosazana would do well to lose no time. If she could start at daylight it would be highly advisable. But no one must know. It was in the conditions.
To say that Verna was suddenly lifted from darkness to daylight would be to say too little. The condition certainly struck her as strange, but then—the stake at issue! Alaric was not dead, but had perhaps been obliged to go into hiding, was the solution that occurred to her. That was it. Sapazani was their friend, and had warned him, and aided in his concealment. He would get him away out of the country later on, and she—why, she would go to him, go with him, to the uttermost ends of the earth, as she had more than once declared when they had been discussing just such a contingency.
How she got through the night Verna hardly knew. Before dawn she was astir. She woke her father, and told him she was going to start off on another search on her own account, and Ben Halse, himself thoroughly tired out after days spent in the saddle on this bootless quest, had answered that it was quite useless, but that she had better be doing something than nothing, and hail turned over again to sleep the sleep of thorough exhaustion.
As the day dawned, and she was well on her way, Verna became aware that she was being followed, or rather kept up with, by one man. The path was steep and rocky, and she could seldom ride out of a footspace; yet at every turn this man would show himself, either in front or coming on behind with long, swinging strides. Him, however, with an effort of patience and a knowledge of native ways, she forbore to question, though she strongly suspected him of being her visitant of the night before.