"Go quickly!" he said. "Remember it's up to you to warn them. This other is my job. Good-bye!"
He spoke without turning his head; yet the very brevity of his speech seemed to give her strength. Mechanically, she moved to obey.
Later she never remembered passing out of that place of horror. She went, hardly knowing what she did. The sudden smiting of the sunshine between the cypress boughs was the first she knew of having left the temple behind her. As one stricken blind, she moved, too stunned for panic.
And then—how it happened she was utterly unable to realize—as if he had dropped from the sky a man stood suddenly in her path.
He wore a pith helmet dragged forward over his eyes, and she was too dazzled by the sun to see his face. But there was something—something in his gait, his figure, his attitude—that sent a wild thrill through her, waking her to vivid, pulsing life. With an incoherent cry she clutched him by the arm.
"The tiger!" she gasped. "The tiger!"
"Where?" he said.
She pointed back over her shoulder, her eyes dilated, anguished. "In the temple,—and Noel is there! He will be killed!"
In a single movement he had freed his arm and was gone. She heard his feet racing over the stones, and she turned up her face to the blinding sunshine and frantically prayed….
Minutes—or could it have been only seconds?—passed. From below her came Tinker's frightened neigh. She could hear him stamping in the undergrowth. But she had no further thought of going to him. That spot with all its terrors held her chained.