“Why should you have saved it once, if not again?”
“Not once, twice already, if you only knew it.”
Denham stared at him for a moment.
“Ah!” he said, as if a new light had dawned upon him. Then, in his frank, open, taking way, “Save it a third time, then, before you do so a fourth, for at present I’m simply starving.”
“That’s soon remedied.” He said a word to Mandevu, and in a minute or two the latter returned, leading a strong, serviceable-looking horse, and Denham’s eyes grew positively wolfish as they rested upon some bread and biltong which was unpacked from a saddle bag. “Now sit there in the sun and you’ll be dry in half-an-hour.”
The normal hard and cruel expression had given way to a sort of humanised softness in the brown, sun-tanned face of the stranger as he watched Denham sitting there in the newly risen sun, voraciously devouring that which was set before him. At last he said—
“You are a man of your word, Denham.”
“Oh, you know my name,” said the other cheerfully. Some instinct restrained him from suggesting that the advantage was all on one side.
“You have kept the condition which I placed upon you. Not even to Ben Halse’s daughter did you break it.”
“Now how do you know that?” And the question and the straight, frank glance accompanying it would have convinced the other, if he had needed convincing, that this was so.