“By the way, Mr—er?” began Vipan.
”—Vallance.”
“Well, Mr Balance.”
“Er—Vallance.”
“Oh, Vallance, I beg your pardon. Well, Mr Vallance, I was going to say, what do you think of Indian fighting? Never saw ‘Mr Lo’ (Note 1) on the war-path before, I take it?”
“No, never. And I don’t particularly care if I never see him again,” answered Geoffry, flurriedly. “Er—you have saved my life, Mr—er—?”
“Vipan.”
”—Mr Vipan,” he stuttered; “and but for you I should be a dead man at this moment.”
“Not strictly accurate, and that in two particulars,” was the quiet reply. “In the first place, you should have said ‘But for Miss Santorex’; in the second, you would not have had the luck to be a dead man at this moment. You would be squirming a good deal nearer to a slow fire than is either pleasant or salubrious.”
Geoffry turned pale, nor could he repress a slight shudder as he thought of the ghastly fate from which he had escaped, as it were, by the skin of his teeth. Then the sight of his enslaver—so unexpectedly met with, and, like himself, dependent for aid and protection amid the grisly perils of these Western wilds, upon this mysterious stranger, who treated him, Geoffry, with a patronising and tolerant air which under any other circumstances would have been galling in the extreme—roused a wave of jealousy and distrust in the young man’s breast. What the deuce was she doing here, careering about the country with this splendidly handsome desperado? But the latter’s next words seemed to solve the enigma.