"Zara think she do. Thinks he with her now. Go Belize, see her."
"Bah! Bosh! The English missy wouldn't--why, Paz," he broke off suddenly, "what's this in your hand? Haven't you had enough sport to-day--or are you going out shooting the owls to-night for a change?" while as he spoke he pointed to a small rifle the half-caste held in his hand. "Though," he added, "one doesn't shoot birds with rifles."
"No," the other replied, with again the bleat, and with, now, his eyes blazing--"no. Shoot men with him. Nearly shoot one to-day. I find him near where I find drop of blood this afternoon. Hid away under ferns. I take a little walk this evening in the cool. Then I find him."
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
SEBASTIAN IS DISTURBED
"This knoll is becoming historic," Julian said to himself the next morning, as he halted the mustang where twice he had halted it before, when he had been journeying the other way from that which he had now come. "When, some day, the life and adventures of Admiral Ritherdon, K.C.B., and so forth, are given to an admiring world, it must figure in them. Make a pretty frontispiece, too, with its big shady palms and the blue sea beyond the mangroves down below."
In spite, however, of his bright and buoyant nature, which refused to be depressed or subdued by the atmosphere of doubt or suspicion--to give that atmosphere no more important name--he recognised very clearly that matters were serious with him. He knew, too, that the calamities which had approached, without absolutely overwhelming him--so far--were something more than coincidences; natural enough as each by itself might have been in a country which, even now, can scarcely be called anything else than a wild and unsettled one.
"I was once flung off a horse, a buckjumper," he reflected, "in Western Australia when I was a 'sub'; I found a snake in my bed in Burmah; and a chap shot at me once in Vera Cruz--but--but," and he nodded his head meditatively over his recollections, "the whole lot did not happen together in Australia or Burmah or Vera Cruz. If they had done so, it would have appeared rather pointed. And--well--they have all happened together here. That looks rather pointed, too."
"All the same," Julian went on reflectively, as now he tethered the mustang to a bush where it could stand in the shade, and also drew himself well under the spreading branches of the palms--"all the same, I can't and won't believe that Sebastian sees danger to his very firmly-established rights by my presence here. He said on that first night to Madame Carmaux, 'Knowledge is not proof,' and what proof have I against him? This copy of my baptism at New Orleans which I possess can't outweigh that entry of his birth which Spranger has seen in Belize. And there is nothing else. Nothing! Except George Ritherdon's statement to me, which nobody would believe. My own opinion is," he concluded, "that Sebastian, who at the best is a rough, untutored specimen of the remote colonist, with very little knowledge of the world beyond, thinks that if anything happened to me he would only have to put in a claim to whatever I have in England, prove his cousinship, and be put in possession of my few thousands. What a sublime confidence he must have in the simplicity of the English laws!"
Even, however, as he thought all this, there came to him a recollection, a revived memory, of something that had struck him after George Ritherdon's death--something that, in the passage of so many other stirring events, had of late vanished from his mind.