“When will you be ready to begin?”
“When we dock at ’Frisco,” came the immediate response, “provided I be allowed time for an affair of my own, two months from now. A certain private in my old company will be discharged from the service then. I fancy he’ll land there, and I want to be waiting for him when he steps ashore.”
“A reprisal?” inquired Snowdon in a disappointed tone, but the other shook his head.
“He is the one man through whom there’s a chance of clearing my name,” Spurrier said slowly. “I hope it won’t call for violence.”
CHAPTER V
Private Grant had been bred of the blood of hatred and suckled in vindictiveness. He had come into being out of the heritage of feud fighting “foreparents,” and he thought in the terms of his ancestry.
When he had fled into the jungle beyond the island village, though he had been demented and enfeebled, the instinct of a race that had often “hidden out” guided him. That instinct and chance had led him to a native house where his disloyalty gave him a welcome, and there he had found sanctuary until his fever subsided and he emerged cadaverous, but free. Word had filtered through to him there of Spurrier’s court-martial and its result.
In the course of time, fever-wasted yet restored out of his semi-lunacy, he had made his way furtively but successfully toward Manila and there he had supplemented the sketchy fragments of information with which his disloyal native friends had been able to provide him.