The voice in his brain said, “Scare him”; but he did not seem to be an easy man to scare. “I could make the horse shy,” he thought, “though if I do that, I may be bucked off myself.”
“Dis donc,” he said again, “sont ils beaucoup de guardias civiles in Anselmo? Moi, je ne veux pas le police. Sabe? Comprende Usted? Police? Muchas guardias me muchas afraido.”
The man said something in his sullen way that all would be well, better than well: again he turned to his task, leading the horse off the trail.
“Things are getting to be critical,” Hi thought. “I must try a scare.”
He was about to try some sudden startling of the horse, when the woman called out something. The man stopped and shouted in reply: from the woman’s answer Hi made out that she wanted the man for some reason, to do something which she could not do. “Wants him to load the revolver, probably,” he thought. The man seemed vexed at the request: he seemed to ask if she could not manage as she was: she answered “No.”
The man growled in his throat. “Bah. Las mujeres.” He let go the rein, with a look of threat and misgiving. He said something to Hi, which seemed to mean: “You stay here a minute: I’ll be back directly.” He strode off in the direction from which the woman had called. Hi let him go about ten yards, then he turned his horse, and urged him up. The man turned and called out to him to stop. Glancing back, as the horse got into his stride, Hi saw the man running back to where the horses were tethered.
“The brute’s going to chase me,” he thought. “And he’ll track me, even if I dodge him. The worst of it is, that I don’t know whether I am headed for Anselmo or the new Jerusalem; but I must come out somewhere if I keep on. This forest can’t go on for ever.”
This was true; but he had a memory of his father saying, “The forest goes all the way to Cualimaçu on the Matulingas, 1,500 miles if its an inch.” If he happened to be heading for Cualimaçu, his journey to Anselmo was likely to be protracted. For the moment, however, his thought was to get away from these people.
Almost at once, his horse shied from a pool of blood where men had trodden within the hour. It was surrounded by big blue butterflies as greedy for salt as English butterflies for honey. “That’s where the murder was,” he thought, “and those two will follow me because they know that I know.”
After an hour, however, when he halted for the third time to listen for the sound of pursuit, he felt sure that he was not pursued. He rode on slowly through the forest, leaving the direction to the horse, who now seemed to know where he was going. As far as he could tell, in the gloom of under the trees, he went westwards but not directly, for the thorn thickets forced him now in one direction, now in another.