“Noie, too, is a good prophet,” she broke in reflectively. “You used the Zulus to kill her father and mother also, did you not? Do you remember a message that she gave you from Seyapi one evening, down by the sea, before you kidnapped her to be a bait to trap me in Zululand?”
“Remember!” he answered, scowling. “Am I likely to forget her devilries? If you are the witch, she is the familiar, the black ehlosé (spirit) who whispers in your ears. Had she not gone I should never have caught you.”
“But she will come back—although I fear not in time to bid you farewell.”
“You tell me that I shall soon be dead,” he exclaimed, ignoring this talk of Noie. “Well, I am not frightened. I don’t believe you know anything about it, but if you are right the more reason I should live while I can. According to you, Rachel, we have no time to waste in a long engagement. When is it to be?”
“Never!” she answered contemptuously, “in this or any other world. Never! Why, you are hateful to me; when I see you, I shiver as though a snake crawled across my foot, and when I look at your hands they are red with blood, the blood of my parents and of Noie’s parents, and of many others. That is my answer.”
He looked at her a while, then said:
“You seem to forget that I am only asking for what I can take. No one can see you or hear you here, except my women. You are in my power at last, Rachel Dove.”
These words which Ishmael intended should frighten her, as they might well have done, produced, as it chanced, a quite different effect. Rachel broke into a scornful laugh.
“Look,” she said, pointing to an eagle that circled so high in the blue heavens above them that it seemed no larger than a hawk, “that bird is more in your power, and nearer to you than I am. Before you laid a finger on me I would find a dozen means of death, but that, I tell you again, you will never live to do.”
For a while Ishmael was silent, weighing her words in his mind. Apparently he could find no answer to them, for when he spoke again it was of another matter.