“So there is. We’ll make for it,” and, picking up their horses’ heads, they approached the dwelling, which was a sorry-looking affair. Darker and darker it grew, and a drizzling shower began to fall. Suddenly a light gleamed from the ill-closed window, and at the same time a man’s voice, raised high in expostulation, reached their ears—a voice not unfamiliar to Claverton, withal, and in its tones he caught his own name. Quickly he dismounted.
“Sam,” he whispered. “Take the horses out of sight, there, in the bush—quietly, d’you hear? And if you hear a row, come and look after me without a moment’s loss. You’ll soon see which way to shoot.”
“Yeh bo ’Nkos,” replied the ready-witted native, whose eyes sparkled with excitement. Then silently, and with a rapid glide, Claverton made his way round to the back of the house. Through a chink under the window-joist he could see the interior of a room—a mouldy, disused room, with damp, discoloured walls, and rotting beams festooned with cobwebs; but the place wore a look of familiarity to him, even as a sight or a sound which now and then will strike our imaginations as in no wise to be accounted for save in the previous experience of a dream. For a moment he was puzzled; then it flashed upon him that he was looking into the room where he and Ethel Brathwaite had taken refuge on the night of the storm. Yes; there was the very place where she had slept and he had covered her with his cloak, and where she had sat when terrified by the wolf; and, straining his gaze further, he almost expected to see that quadruped’s footsteps in the dust by the half-open door. A fire burnt in the middle of the room, and there by the side of it lay the very stone he had used for a seat. It all seemed so strange that he seriously began to think he must be dreaming.
But he was wide awake enough as the sound of voices was heard, and two men entered the room from outside, closing the door after them. And in one of them Claverton recognised his recruit of yesterday; the other he had never seen before. He was an Englishman—a tall, dark man, well made and erect of carriage, evidently a gentleman by birth, and yet with a certain sinister expression that would have led the watcher to regard him with distrust even had he not heard his own name brought into the conversation.
“It’s all right, Sharkey,” this one was saying.
“Your ears must have played you tricks. There’s no sign of any one moving.”
“No, there ain’t. Well, now, Cap’n, about this devil Claverton?”
“Yes, I’ll be as good as my word. One hundred pounds, this day six months.”
“Make it two, Cap’n; make it two. He’s a devil to deal with—a very devil. You don’t know him as well as I do.”
“No; one. Not another stiver. And now, are you downright sure that Arthur Lidwell and Arthur Claverton are one and the same man? Could you swear to him?”