Nsharra shrugged slim shoulders. "All the village knows that he is a stranger from the mountains and that he seeks to hire you and your comrades to go back to his land with him."
Eric Nelson could believe that, for he had had past experience with the swiftness of gossip in an Oriental town. His fogged mind was still baffled, though, by the thing that didn't explain — the queer similarity between Shan Kar and Nsharra, as though they belonged to the same race.
All that didn't matter. What mattered was that this was the last night for him, that the girl's tapering fingers were light against his cheek, her breath warm in his ear.
Nelson gulped his wine and looked up from it to see the wolf-dog crouched in the open doorway of the hut, watching him with fixed, luminous green eyes.
And the great head and fiery eyes of the big stallion were watching too from out in the darkness. There was something perched on the stallion's back, something winged and rustling.
"Will you tell those two beasts to go away?" Nelson said thickly to the girl. "I don't like them. They look as though they were listening to every word."
The girl looked at the wolf-dog and horse. She did not speak. But wolf and stallion melted back into the darkness.
"Hatha and Tark mean no harm," Nsharra murmured soothingly. "They are my friends."
Deep in Nelson's mind, something in her words plucked another hidden string of memory, something that set up vaguely unpleasant vibrations in his brain.
But he couldn't think of that nor of the two queer beasts out there in the dark with his arm around Nsharra's pliant body and his lips on her soft mouth.