“Funked again!” echoed Clare. “I don’t believe he ever did such a thing in his life—no, nor ever could. Because he was too much of a gentleman to be drawn into a disgusting tap-room brawl to please a drunken rowdy, you call that funking. Well, I don’t, and I shouldn’t have the good opinion I have of Mr Lamont if he had acted otherwise. You forget, too, that we were all there, and even in Gandela I suppose it’s hardly the correct thing to indulge in prize fights in the presence of ladies.”
“Phew!” whistled Fullerton. “So that’s the way the cat jumps; Clare has struck her flag at last, Lucy. Lamont’s captured her.”
“Oh, go easy, Dick. I won’t have Clare teased,” was all the response he got in the conjugal quarter.
“She seems jolly well able to take care of herself anyhow,” pronounced her brother-in-law resentfully.
“I like fair play,” rejoined the girl, “and a great many of you don’t seem to know the meaning of the word. Because somebody says one thing, and somebody else another about a man who is really too much of a man to bother himself about it—you all go to work to make him out this and to make him out that. You’re worse than a pack of spiteful women.”
Oh, how she longed to tell them all she knew—how the man they were decrying had spent the day watching over the safety of all present, how his cool nerve and unflagging resource had averted from them the ghastly peril that threatened. But this she could not do. She was bound over to absolute and entire secrecy.
“By Jingo, I’ll tell you another thing now,” said Fullerton. “Blest if I didn’t meet this very chap, Lamont, at the bend of the road, just beyond the house, at twelve o’clock last night—you know, just after those fellows left us. He was strolling this way, and he’d got a Lee-Metford magazine rifle. I asked him what the deuce he was playing at sentry-go like that for, and he grunted something about getting his hand in, whatever that might mean; and when I wanted him to come in and have a whisky—for you can’t be inhospitable even though you don’t care much for a fellow—he wouldn’t, because he was afraid of scaring you all if you saw him with a rifle at that time of night, and of course he wouldn’t leave it outside. What was he up to, that’s the question. I own it stumps me.”
“Ah!” said Clare, with a provoking smile. “What was he up to?”
But a new light had swept in upon her mind. In view of what she had learned that morning there was nothing eccentric about this lonely watcher and his midnight vigil. And yet—and yet—why should he have singled out Richard Fullerton’s house as the special object of his self-imposed guardianship?
Meanwhile a sort of council of war was going on elsewhere. It consisted of four persons, Orwell the Resident Magistrate, Isard the officer in command of the Mounted Police stationed at Gandela, Driffield the Native Commissioner, and Lamont. To the other three the latter had just unfolded his tale of the conspiracy, and the steps he had taken to avert its execution on the previous day.