"I will come, sure enough," the man said. "I would walk a hundred miles, if they would let me, for half a pound of pigtail."
"Get rid of them, Surajah," Dick whispered, as the man shouldered his way through the crowd. "Make some excuse to send them off."
"Now, my friends," Surajah said, "you see it is getting dusk. It will soon be too dark to see what you are buying, and we have been selling for eight hours, and need rest. At eight o'clock tomorrow we will open our packs again, and everyone shall be served; but I pray you excuse us going on any longer now. As you see, we are not as young as we once were, and are both sorely weary."
As time was no object, and the work of purchasing would relieve the tedium of the following day, the crowd good humouredly dispersed. Surajah rose and closed the door after the last of them, and then turned to Dick. He had, himself, been too busily engaged in satisfying the demands of the customers to look up, and had not noticed that one of them was a white man.
"What is it?" he asked, as he looked round. "Has the heat upset you?"
Then, as his eye fell on Dick, his voice changed, and he hurried towards him, exclaiming anxiously:
"What is it, Dick? What has happened?"
For Dick was leaning against a bale by the side of him, and had hidden his face in his arms. Surajah saw that his whole frame was shaking with emotion.
"My dear lord," Surajah said, as he knelt beside him and laid his arm across his shoulder, "you frighten me. Has aught gone wrong? Are you ill?"
Dick slightly shook his head, and, lifting one of his hands, made a sign to Surajah that he could not, at present, speak. A minute or two later, he raised his head.