“I wonder who is with her now!” he muttered, as he gazed with lowering brow at the smooth, star-spangled stream.
“What does it matter! I’ll get a lesson in nonchalance from old Chum! I’ve been fooled like the rest. I might have known that I should be, but I was conceited enough to think that I had thoroughly won her heart.”
He told himself that it was all over now, and smoked away viciously, sending forth great puffs of vapour, still thinking of his position.
“What the dickens did that woman, the Inche Maida, mean!” he said, suddenly, as he strolled now close beside the river in complete forgetfulness of all the dangers with which it was invested by his friends. “Why, if I were a conceited fellow—well, so I am, horribly,” he said, bitterly—“I should have fancied that she was making love to me. It is too ridiculous!” he exclaimed, stopping short, and seeing nothing but introspectively, hearing nothing but the echoes of his own thoughts. “This place is growing hateful to me. I shall get leave or exchange. I feel as if I could not stay here any longer, and—Hah! Help! What! Good Heav—”
The rest of Hilton’s words did not reach the soft midnight air, for, deep in thought, he had not seen the shadow even of the coming danger which had fallen in an instant, and his mad struggles were proving all in vain.
Volume Two—Chapter Ten.
Plus.
As Hilton cried for help his voice sounded stifled and dull, while he vainly tried to cast off a great woollen cloth that had been deftly thrown over his head. It took hardly an instant before it was wound tightly round him. Then a rope was twisted so rapidly round arms and legs, that he was turned, as it were, into a complete mummy; and when his assailants threw him upon the grass he was so helpless that they literally rolled him over and over down the slope of closely shaven herbage into a large row-boat, into whose bottom he fell without pain, and almost without a sound.