Then Hi thought, “But what’s he up to? He saw me in the room five minutes ago; then probably he went after me in the kitchen. What brings him here again? What is he staring at there? Can there be another man in the room? He must know that I cleared out: he saw me do it. Is he waiting to plug me when I come back, or what?”
He waited for another fifteen seconds, but the man never stirred a muscle. He stood at the window, pressed to it, intently staring. Hi had seen cats and foxes waiting intently thus before springing; but the cats and foxes had at least trembled with the intensity of their control, this man was motionless.
“But who in the wide earth is he staring at?” Hi asked himself. “There must be someone in that room whom I never saw, but who was there when I was there.” Then he thought, “Whatever is in the room, there is something wrong with that man. He is not quite of this world.”
That was an opinion which the horse seemed to share, and the presence of it in the horse made Hi’s terror stronger. Yet the intentness of that watching figure “not quite of this world,” was fascinating. All purpose will arrest the purposeless, but this deadly purpose was absorbing. It made Hi forget that looking at a person will draw that person’s eyes towards the looker. For the moment, he did not care; he longed to see what the man saw. He stared: his horse also stared.
Suddenly a gust of the wind, now blowing at its height, caught the window by which Hi had escaped. Hi heard it crash to, with a tinkle of glass. The draught inside the house flung some door open, and blew ajar the unhasped casement by which the watcher stood. The result was something which Hi had not expected. The man slithered sideways, scraping along the wall, and collapsed, with his head towards Hi, and his gun arm twisted askew as no living arm could ever twist. The light, shining now from the unobstructed window pane, showed Hi the bullet-hole through which the body’s death had come.
The horse had swerved aside when the body fell. The knowledge that the man was dead, and had been dead from the first, came to Hi in a flash, at his first movement. The smell of powder in the room suddenly became significant. “That explains the big revolver shell,” he thought. “Oh, golly, let’s get out of this.”
The horse was out of sorts, but the cold had touched him up, and something of his rider’s terror was afflicting him. He swerved away from the house and galloped ahead across a peach plantation. Hi heard horses whinny and a man’s voice hailing him from behind him as he entered the plantation. The dreadful fear that it was the dead man mounted on the nightmare made him crouch on his horse’s neck and urge him forward. He heard shouts, calling to him to stop, or so it seemed.
At any other time, he might have stopped; but he could not now, after the corpse flopping down towards him. In a few moments, he was certain that men were shouting at him, several men, in earnest, shouting no Christian tongue. By this time he had crossed the plantation fence at a place where the bars were down, he was heading across a patch of savannah towards the forest. He heard horses coming after him. He called out that he was English and a friend. The man who was nearest to him, perhaps mistaking this for an insult, fired a shot in the direction of the voice, but missed. Hi crackled through some hard-leaved scrub into the darkness of the covert, leaving the direction to the horse. Many horses crackled into the scrub behind him. He called out again that he was English and a friend, but his bailers cursed him, called to him to stop and opened fire at him. As he rode, he heard the piping drone of birds; then, suddenly, some of the birds spat and hissed close to his ears, twigs fell from the trees about him; he knew suddenly that the birds were bullets.
The pursuers, with one exception, soon pulled up, the firing ceased, only one man still followed, calling to him to stop. Suddenly this one pursuer pulled up, and Hi at the same instant felt a coldness of fear all over him. There came a shot and shock, his horse swerved violently, staggered, recovered, and bolted into the forest. “He hit the horse,” Hi said, “but not badly, or he wouldn’t go like this.” For the rest of the ride his task was to keep on.
How long he rode the forest he never knew: the horse went on in his terror till he could go no more, then he halted, full of the ends of terror, nervy, starting at a shadow and trembling.