Nares looked at him with a curious little smile. "It is possible that I might escape with my liberty, but not until those who hate us had blackened my character and flung discredit upon the aims and methods of the men who sent me here. Is my acquittal worth what it would cost your Society? Would the folks down yonder miss such an opportunity as my trial would afford them of making us out political intriguers and destroyers of authority?"
He broke off for a moment, and laughed softly. "Still, they can't very well have a trial without a prisoner, and I shall wait in the bush until Ormsgill overtakes me. I have left word for him here and there with men who I think will not betray me."
"Why shouldn't you stay here?" asked the younger man.
"And bring the authorities down upon you? You know the cost of harboring me. Still, I will wait a day or two. Ormsgill must go inland by the road through the next valley, and if he has escaped the troops, there should be news of him any hour now."
The others said nothing further. They knew those in authority had, perhaps, naturally little love for them, and would make the most of the opportunity if it became evident that they had sheltered a proscribed man. After all, they had a duty to their flock and the men who had sent them out. Nares, who guessed their thoughts, smiled at them.
"It is all decided," he said. "When Ormsgill comes up I, believing as I do in the straitest teaching of the Geneva fathers, am going into the interior with him to accomplish the work he has undertaken for the repose of the soul of the rum trader Lamartine."
Again his companions made no answer. After all, the creeds now and then grow vague in Africa, or, perhaps, in the anguish of life in the dark land they are purged of their narrowness and amplified. Besides this, it was evident that Nares was a trifle off his balance. There was silence for the next half hour. One of the men had toiled with the hoe among his flock that day, and the other had come back from a long march to a native village. The night was clear and cool and wonderfully still, and the peace of the garden valley crept in on them. One could almost have fancied the mission had been translated far from Africa, where tranquillity that is not tempered with apprehension seldom lasts very long. Then a sharp cry, harsh with human pain and terror, rang out of the soft darkness, and the man in charge of the station rose quietly from his chair.
"Herrero's men are here. Our time has come at last," he said.
The others rose with him, and stood very still for a moment or two listening until the cry arose again more shrilly, and there was a clamor among the unseen huts. The crash of a long flintlock gun broke through it, and in the midst of the uproar they heard a patter of naked feet. Half-seen shadowy figures swept past among the leaves, and a red glare that grew momentarily brighter leapt up behind the mango trees.
"Herrero's men," said the older man again, as though in the bitterness of the moment that was all that occurred to him.