He stretched himself on the ground, emitting a forced yawn—very forced. The others, on their side of the tenement, followed his example. He could determine, by sounds of light snoring, that the tenement already contained others before these late arrivals. Soon the latter were likewise in the Land of Nod.
Lying there in the pitchy darkness Lamont realised that his position was exciting, to put it mildly. Here he was, in the same hut with two of the conspirators, and how many others he could, of course, not determine. The next thing was to get out again. But for that he must take his time. Hurry would be fatal.
If ever minutes had seemed to him hours, assuredly they did so now. And with this idea a new source of peril struck him. In the dead silence he thought to hear the ticking of his watch. What if other ears should hear it too. He thought to stop it—but how so much as get it open in the darkness without breaking the glass; and then just one fragment on the floor of the hut would betray him in the morning. Still, with his blanket tightly round him, the ticking might not be heard. At last he reckoned it time to make a move.
It is a mistake to imagine that savages are necessarily light sleepers. When no particular reason for watchfulness exists, your South African native is anything but that. Rolled up in his blanket, head and all, he will sleep as soundly as the dead, and will require little short of violence to awaken him; wherefore the other inhabitants of the hut, being utterly unsuspicious of the presence of a stranger in their midst, had attained to exactly that stage of somnolence; consequently, when the said stranger crept through the door, no one was aware of it. Again his nerves thrilled as he found himself once more in the chilly night air. He had still a little way to go. What if the dogs should wind him as he crossed the open space, and raise a clamour? But they did not, and with a sigh of infinite relief he found himself safe within his own hut. He could hear his travelling companion mildly snoring. What an extraordinary piece of luck that they should have met when they did, for, by the light of what he had heard, he had no doubt but that his treacherous entertainers would have murdered him. Had he spent the night alone in that kraal, such would have been his fate, but the superstitious dread in which, for some reason or other, they seemed to hold the priest, had saved him, and in the result would save a good many more.
Then the grisly agency of his awakening occurred to him, and indeed no more effective means could have been employed not merely to do so but to keep him awake. His fellow traveller would, he supposed, have called it the hand of Providence, and he thought it looked very much as if such were the case, for Lamont was no scoffer.
“I suppose I ought to make a vow never again to kill a tarantula,” he said to himself; “for what would have been the result had I slept as hard and long as our good friend over there, well, Heaven only knows.”
Sitting there in the darkness, waiting for dawn, he was thinking, and thinking hard. There had been warning rumours here and there that the natives were not so content under the white man’s rule as was supposed—nor that they deemed themselves anything like so roundly squashed and beaten less than three years earlier as they should have. Such rumours, however, were not acceptable to the “powers that were,” and their originators discouraged; and bearing this in mind, what was seemingly the most obvious course—to lose no time in warning the proper authorities, to wit—was the very last thing that Lamont had determined to follow. If he started warning people, nobody would believe him. They would simply laugh and say he had got the funks, meanwhile it would be sure to leak out to the natives that such warning had been given. They would put two and two together, and, connecting it in some way with his presence at their kraal that night, would entirely change their plan, probably with disastrous result to the white population. On the other hand, if the massacre at Gandela were averted, it would show, as they had agreed, that the time for rising was not yet ripe—which would afford him time to turn his warning to proper account, a thing he could not possibly do in one day.
That the massacre at Gandela should be averted he was fully determined, and that he himself should be the means of averting it—he alone, working to his own hand.