"Do you suppose Echochee will trust us to get them away?" I whispered.
"If Lady say come, she come," he answered.
This set me thinking, and I decided to write a note that Smilax could deliver. Sylvia might then feel assured that she was not being abducted by a negro whom Echochee had known only in childhood. But, on second thought, I wondered if she would risk escape with an unknown white man; if she would not rather face the supreme issue, once and for all, than perhaps be forced into it later by an over-zealous stranger! In her distracted state of mind I feared she would find the rescue too precarious—too easily offering the same danger that beset her now, and lacking her present weapon of defense. Yet if she refused to come—what then? I could always rush the camp, if but to die with her. Having gone over these possibilities, I whispered to Smilax:
"She'll come easier if she doesn't know I'm here. Echochee will remember you, and reassure her. You might tell Echochee that you were hunting this way and saw her beat the chap over the head with the tray. Understand? After that you saw the rest and realized how much trouble she was in. How about it?"
"Good," he grunted. "That good. To-night me tell Echochee get ready, and to-morrow night we run 'way—maybe to Reservation. But we come by camp and find you; then all work 'round to yacht. Good."
"Well," I demurred, "that isn't the way I meant, for I intend to stay here and help. Some of those devils might get busy!"
"That good, too. Now we eat; then you go sleep."
While tackling our rations we discussed the plan again and again. I did not want to leave Sylvia another night within the grasp of those fiends, but Smilax insisted; explaining that she was practically safe for three days, at any rate. Of course, each twenty-four hours would make her and Echochee weaker from starvation and, as they would need strength, we dared not wait too long. Immediate help from the Whim was all but a forlorn hope. The rescue had come suddenly up to us, and it must be met without a thought of failure.
But as the tiresome afternoon wore on without further incidents to keep us aroused, my fancies drifted from rescues to the rescued; and after a while I whispered:
"I'll take that nap now,"—scarcely hearing him reply: