“When do you think they will come and set us free, father?”
“I do not know that they will set us free, dear boy; it may not be God’s will,” was the substance of Gaunt’s reply to this oft-repeated question; at which the little fellow would look at his father in surprise and retort:
“But, father, you used to tell me that God is always pleased to hear and answer the prayers of little children!”
In short, the child at length got the better of the man in this curious theological discussion, and Gaunt was finally obliged to give in.
“He is right,” the father at length admitted to himself, “and I am wrong. After striving with all my might during the whole of his brief little life to inculcate in him an absolute belief in the unalterable truth of God’s promises, why should I now allow the weakness of my own faith to undermine his? My child is in the hands of a merciful God; there will I leave him.”
And so, when, from time to time, after that, the little fellow repeated his question of “When do you think they will come and set us free, father?” Gaunt would reply hopefully:
“Oh, very soon now, I should think, dear boy; very soon.”
The long, weary, trying night was wearing to its close. The moon hung low in the western sky; the horizon to the eastward was paling from violet-black to pearly-grey; and the stars in that quarter were beginning to lose their lustre. The air, which during the earlier hours of the night had been oppressively sultry, now came cool and refreshing to the fevered brows of the anxious watchers; the insects had subdued their irritating din, as is their wont toward the dawn; the watch-fire had smouldered down to a heap of grey, feathery, faintly-glowing ashes; the two sentinels at the entrance of the bush-path had ceased their alert pacing to and fro, and, having grounded their muskets, were now drooping wearily upon them with their hands crossed over the top of the barrels; whilst the Malay who had been detailed to watch the prisoners, having some half a dozen times during the earlier hours of the night tested their bonds and satisfied himself of their perfect security, was now seated on the ground before his charges, with his ringers interlocked across his knees and his head bowed forward, manifestly napping. The weariness of the long night had told upon both the prisoners; their conversation had first languished and then ceased altogether; but now the cool, fresh, sweet-smelling breeze had aroused them both, Gaunt first, and the poor, tired-out, suffering child soon afterwards; and whilst the first was looking abroad over the tree-tops at the brightening sky to the eastward and thinking that now, surely, their fate must be drawing very nigh, the little fellow by his side stirred uneasily, roused himself, and once more put the stereotyped question:
“Now, father, when do you think they will come and set us free?”
Gaunt, with their probable fate now apparently so near at hand, was debating within himself what answer to return, when his attention was arrested by a curious vibrating movement of his bonds, as though they were being tampered with from behind the tree to which he was bound; and ere he could collect his faculties sufficiently to even ask himself what it meant, a low whisper from behind him caught his ear: