“Oh, are you awake?” Letcombe-Bassett answered. “I was going quietly so as not to wake you. I was afraid you might be asleep. I only wanted to say that we’ll start in good time to-morrow, if you feel up to moving.”
“To Anselmo? I’m up to moving.”
“I know nothing about Anselmo. I can start to set you on a road which will take you to Santa Barbara.”
“That will do. Thank you.”
“Right. We’ll start then after an early chow. Sleep easy.”
He moved across the hut entrance towards his own hut; Hi wished him good-night. “He’s a pretty bad egg,” Hi thought. “He is here for no good and he means me no good.”
These thoughts in his brain slowly merged into the noises of the village, which in turn grew into a night that covered him: he fell asleep in his hammock half covered by a quilt of cotton.
On this the sixth day of Hi’s journey, the five hundred odd men of Don Manuel’s army made their first march of fifty miles to the eastward, so as to camp at the water-holes at Amarga. At the water-holes, they were joined by some seventy more men, who had either followed them, or ridden in from the north or south. When they left Amarga they were more than six hundred strong.
XVI
It may have been the cold working upon a body worn by anxieties and hardships: it may have been confusion in a brain nine-tenths asleep; or it may have been another thing. As he slept, Hi became aware that Dudley Wigmore was in the hut, sitting on a box, waiting for him to wake. He could see him distinctly; a sad-looking man, of the middle build, fair-haired, blue-eyed, gentle and thoughtful, yet with a clench of resolution, in mouth and chin, which made the face memorable.