XXI
CLAVERING APPEARS RIDICULOUS
There was silence in the log-house when the men drove away, and Clavering, who sat in a corner, found the time pass heavily. A clock ticked noisily upon the wall, and the stove crackled when the draughts flowed in; but this, he felt, only made the stillness more exasperating. The big, hard-faced bushman sat as motionless as a statue and almost as expressionless, with a brown hand resting on the rifle across his knees, in front of a row of shelves which held Miss Muller’s crockery. Clavering felt his fingers quiver in a fit of anger as he watched the man, but he shook it from him, knowing that he would gain nothing by yielding to futile passion.
“I guess I can smoke,” he said flinging his cigar-case on the table. “Take one if you feel like it.”
The swiftness with which the man’s eyes followed the first move of his prisoner’s hand was significant, but he shook his head deliberately.
“I don’t know any reason why you shouldn’t, but you can keep your cigars for your friends,” he said.
He drawled the words out, but the vindictive dislike in his eyes made them very expressive, and Clavering, who saw it, felt that any attempt to gain his jailer’s goodwill would be a failure. As though to give point to the speech, the man took out a pipe and slowly filled it with tobacco from a little deerskin bag.
“What are you going to do with me?” asked Clavering, partly to hide his anger, and partly because he was more than a little curious on the subject.