Dyke’s but meant a good deal. The position was growing serious, yet he did not feel dismayed, for, to use his own words, it seemed to stir him up to show fight.
“And I will, too,” he said through his teeth. “I’ll let ’em see.”
He went back into the house to find Emson sleeping, and apparently neither he nor the dog had moved.
“Ah, Duke, that’s right,” said Dyke. “I shall want you. You can keep watch for me when I go away.”
Just then Tanta Sal came in, smiling, to tell him that breakfast was ready, and he began to question her about when his brother was taken ill. But either from obtuseness or obstinacy, he could get nothing from the woman, and he was about to let her go while he ate his breakfast of mealie cake and hot milk; but a sudden thought occurred to him. Had those Kaffirs been about there before?
He asked the woman, but in a moment her smile had gone, and she was staring at him helplessly, apparently quite unable to comprehend the drift of his questions; so he turned from her in a pet, to hurry through his breakfast, thinking the while of what he had better do.
He soon decided upon his first step, and that was to try and get Jack off to Morgenstern’s with his letter; and after attending to Emson and repeating the medicine he had given the previous day, he went out, to find that the animals had been fed, and that Jack was having his own breakfast with his wife.
There was a smile for him directly from both, and he plunged into his business at once; but as he went on, the smiles died out, and all he said was received in a dull, stolid way. Neither Jack nor his wife would understand what he meant—their denseness was impenetrable.
“It’s of no use to threaten him,” said Dyke to himself, as he went back; “he would only run away and take Tant with him, and then I should be ten times worse off than I am now. I must go myself. Yes, I could take two horses, and ride first one and then the other, and so set over the round faster. I could do it in a third of the time.”
But he shook his head wearily as he glanced at where Emson lay.