It must have been about four o’clock in the afternoon when she found herself suddenly face to face with him in the opening of the tent. With such unexpected agility had he sprung upon the brake that for the moment she was taken unawares, and might easily have been out-generalled, but for his cocksureness that he was master of the situation. He stood there smiling his slow evil smile—giving her time to shift farther into the tent and lay her hand on the stock of the revolver. “What do you want?” she demanded evenly. He assumed an air of hurt surprise. “I suppose I can have a ride in my own waggon if I want to?”
“Not here,” she said in a firm voice. “You must go and ride where you have always ridden. This tent has been given over to me and I mean to keep possession of it.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t be so unkind,” he said with a slimy smile, and made to mount his knee on the mattress and clamber in, but found himself nose to nose with the shining steel barrel.
“If you stir a hand, I fire.” Her voice was absolutely steady. “Get down!”
His utterly dumbfoundered look and the alacrity with which he loosened his hold on the side of the tent and dropped from the brake was funny. But his face was not funny. Something in it made Vivienne shiver. His mouth under the tilted moustache worked as if it tasted poison, and his eyes were bad to see. Down in the road he looked upwards once more to where Vivienne sat, the weapon lowered, but still in sight.
“So that’s it?” he muttered. “He left you his revolver, did he?”
It was plain, of course, that she could have come by it in no other way. He walked behind awhile blinking and swallowing the dust, considering perhaps the problem of how much she had told the other man. Then silently in his veld-schoened feet he passed to the side of the waggon, and for the time being she saw him no more.
Nor even heard him. The tent on a buck-waggon is so placed that when the latter is loaded there is no way of entering or seeing from the tent except from the brake end. The whole of the back opening was blocked with heavy packing-cases that could not have been budged except by the efforts of several men. Vivienne congratulated herself on that for it made for safety. But it also kept her in ignorance of what was going forward in the front part of the waggon, or even at the sides. All she could do through that long bright hot afternoon was to sit like Sister Anne in her tower watching the road down which help might come.
When she observed that the waggon was no longer on the road, she was instantly on the alert for the meaning of the new move. It was too early to outspan, and if Roper did so he must know that he could easily be caught up, for they had not been travelling more than three hours! But they did not stop. They went crashing on over shrub and bush, lurching against ant-hills, being torn at by the branches of trees.
At last, the terrified girl realised what was happening. Roper was leaving the road and all danger of interference from those who might be travelling on it, and making for the wild bush!