"All right!" came Druro's voice, cool and careless. "If he's dead, he's dead. I am prepared to accept the consequences."
The Australians stood off, grouped together, muttering. Guthrie and Tryon moved to either side of Druro, and between them he walked calmly away from the house. When they reached the car, he took the seat beside Tryon, Guthrie climbed in next to Gay, and they drove away without a word being spoken. The whole nightmare happening had passed with the precision and ease of a clockwork scene played by marionettes. Now the curtain was down, and nothing remained but the haunting, fateful words still ringing in the ears of them all. Small wonder they sat silent as death. As the car entered the precincts of the town, Druro said to Tryon:
"I must go to the police camp and report this thing, Dick. But, first drive to the 'Falcon,' will you? I've just remembered that I had an appointment there and must go and apologize."
They drew up at a side entrance of the hotel and Druro stepped out and turned almost mechanically to open the door for those behind. So far he had shown no knowledge of Gay's presence, but he now looked straight into her eyes without any sign of surprise. He held out his hand to help her to descend, and, in the same instant, swiftly withdrew it.
"I forgot," he said, and, for an instant, stood staring at his palm and then at her in a dazed, musing sort of way. "There is blood upon it!"
Gay could not speak. Her heart felt breaking. It seemed to her that, in that moment, with the shadow of crime on him, he had suddenly changed into a bright-haired, innocent, wistful boy. She longed, with an infinite, brooding love that was almost maternal, to shelter and comfort him against all the world. But she could do nothing. Even if she could have spoken, there was nothing to say. Only, on an impulse, she caught the hand he had drawn back, and, for a moment, held it close between her warm, generous little palms. Then she slipped away into the darkness, and he went into the hotel, walking like a man in a dream.
PART II
Cold-blooded nerve, otherwise intrepid cheek, is a much admired quality in that land of bluffs and blagues called Rhodesia. Therefore, when Lundi Druro walked into Mrs. Hading's ballroom in his old grey lounge suit, with ruffled hair and the distrait eyes of a man dreaming of other things, and proceeded, in casual but masterly fashion, to detach his hostess from the tentacles of a new admirer, Wankelo silently awarded him the palm of palms. But no one who saw Mrs. Hading's face as she walked out of the ballroom by his side envied him his job of conciliation.
However, they could not know that her cold looks were for their benefit rather than Druro's. Banal upbraidings would not bring off the coup she had planned, and she did not intend to employ them. When she and Druro were out of earshot in a far corner of the veranda, the face she turned to him wore nothing on it but an expression of lovely and tender pain that he found much harder to contend with than anything she could possibly have said.
Contritely he proffered his profound apologies and regrets. But when all was said and done, it boiled down to the same old lame duck of an excuse that was yet the simple and shameful truth.