“How ingenious!” she cried, looking first around the earthy cell and then out through the loop-holes. “Now, let’s imagine we are beleaguered here, and that the savages are wheeling and circling around us. We could ‘stand them off’—isn’t that the expression?—till next week.”
“And then if nobody came to get us out of our fix next week?”
“Oh, then we could hold out until the week after.”
“You think that would be fun, eh?”
“Of course,” she answered, her eyes dancing with glee in response to his queer half-smile.
“H’m. Well I’m very glad there’s no chance of your undergoing the actual experience,” he answered drily, turning away to gaze out on the surrounding country, but really that she should not see the expression that swept across his face. For it had come to this. Rupert Vipan—adventurer, renegade, freebooter—a stranger, for many a year, to any softening or tender feeling—a man, too, who had already attained middle age—thought, as he listened to her words, how willingly he would give the remainder of his life for just that experience. To be besieged here for days with this girl—only they two, all alone together—himself her sole protector, with a violent and horrible death at the end of it, he admitted at that moment would be to him Paradise. Yet a consciousness of the absurdity of the idea struck him even then. Who was he in her eyes, in the eyes of those around her, her friends and protectors? An unknown adventurer—a mere commonplace border ruffian. And—at his time of life, too!
“Were you ever besieged in one of these places?” asked Yseulte.
Her voice recalled him to himself.
“Once,” he answered. “In ’67, on the Smoky Hill route, four stagemen and myself. The reds burnt us out the first night, and we got into the dug-out. It was wearisome work, for they preserved a most respectful distance once we were down there. They wouldn’t haul off, though. So one man kept a look-out at the loop-holes, while the rest of us played poker or varied the tedium by swapping lies.”
“Doing what?”