“Lie still!” he said rather quietly, in English. “Give me the halter, please!” he said to Clare, without looking up. “It’s hanging to the shaft there in a coil.”
Kneeling on the man’s chest—to tell the truth, he was badly stunned, though not unconscious—Brook took two half-hitches with the halter round one wrist, passed the line under his neck as he lay, and hauled on it till the arm came under his side, then hitched the other wrist, passed the line back, hauled on it, and finally took two turns round the throat. Clare watched the operation, very pale and breathing hard.
“He’s drunk,” observed Johnstone. “Otherwise I wouldn’t tie him up, you know. Now, if you move,” he said in English to his prisoner, “you’ll strangle yourself.”
Thereupon he rose, forced the fellow to roll over, and hitched the fall of the line round both wrists again, and made it fast, so that the man lay, with his head drawn back by his own hands, which he could not move without tightening the rope round his neck.
“He’s frightened now,” said Brook. “Let’s get the poor mule out of that.”
In a few minutes he got the wretched beast free. It was ready enough to rise as soon as it felt that it could do so, and it struggled to its feet, badly hurt by the beating and bleeding in many places, but not seriously injured. The carter watched them as he lay on the road, half strangled, and cursed them in a choking voice.
“And now, what in the world are we going to do with them?” asked Brook, rubbing the mule’s nose. “It’s a pretty bad case,” he continued, thoughtfully. “The mule can’t draw the load, the carter can’t be allowed to beat the mule, and we can’t afford to let the carter have his head. What the dickens are we to do?”
He laughed a little. Then he suddenly looked hard at Clare, as though remembering something.
“It was awfully plucky of you to jump on him in that way,” he said. “Just at the right moment, too, by Jove! That devil would have got at me if you hadn’t stopped him. Awfully plucky, upon my word! And I’m tremendously obliged, Miss Bowring, indeed I am!”