Her voice was strong enough, and Kate looked at Jim Douglas hopefully. She had recognized him at once, despite his dress, with a faint, dead wonder as to why things were so strange to-day. But he could feel something oozing wet and warm over his supporting arm, he knew the meaning of that whitening face; so he shook his head hopelessly, his eyes on those wide unseeing ones. She was as still, he thought, as she had been when he held her before. Then suddenly the eyes narrowed into sight, and looked him in the face curiously, clearly.
"It's you, is it?" came the old inconsequent laugh. "Why don't you say 'Bravo!--Bravo!--Bra--'"
The crimson rush of blood from her still-smiling lips dyed his hands also, as he caught her up recklessly with a swift order to the others to follow, and ran for the house. But as he ran, clasping her close, close, to him, his whispered bravos assailed her dead ears passionately, and when he laid her on her bed, he paused even in the mad tumult of his rage, his anxiety, his hope for others to kiss the palms of those brave hands ere he folded them decently on her breast, and was out to fetch his horse, and return to where Kate waited for him in the veranda, the child in her arms. Brave also; but the certainty that he had left the flood-level of sympathy and admiration behind him at the feet of a dead woman he had never known, was with him even in his hurry.
"I can't see anyone else about as yet," he said, as he reloaded hastily, "and but for that fiend--that devil of a bird hounding him on--what did it mean?--not that it matters now"--he threw his hand out in a gesture of impotent regret and turned to mount.
Kate shivered. What, indeed, did it mean? A vague recollection was adding to her horror. Had she driven away once from an uncomprehensible appeal in that relentless face? when the bird----
"Don't think, please," said Jim Douglas, pausing to give her a sharp glance. "You will need all your nerve. The troops mutinied at Meerut last night, and killed a lot of people. They have come on here, and I don't trust the native regiments. Go inside, and shut the door. I must reconnoiter a bit before we start."
"But my husband?" she cried, and her tone made him remember the strangeness of finding her in that house. She looked unreliable, to his keen eye; the bitter truth might make her rigid, callous, and in such callousness lay their only chance.
"All right. He asked me to look after--her."
He saw her waver, then pull herself together; but he saw also that her clasp on Sonny tightened convulsively, and he held out his arms.
"Hand the child to me for a moment," he said briefly, "and call that poor lady's ayah from her wailing."