“Did I? Hell. Well, it’s more than that. But I suppose you might reach it. Yes, if you’re not lamed or crocked or ill you ought to reach it.”
“And can you let me take some food and water?”
“You’d better not take those here: you’ll only have to lug them along. No. We’ll stop at another settlement, some miles from here, and get a swag and a gooby for you there. Then you won’t have so much to carry. But here is Chug-chug with the chow. I always have chocolate, Spanish-fashion here, for breakfast. A man has to be pretty hard up to drink maté in cold blood. I’d as soon drink swipes at a wedding.”
After breakfast, the man suggested that they should start. He had his sporting rifle under his arm and his bandolier buckled to him. Hi kept his eyes from resting on the letters D. W. so plainly stamped upon them. He had taken pains to avoid any reference to D. W. He wondered, as they set out, whether he would not come to know the contents of that rifle during the course of the morning. He wondered whether that was why the man had dissuaded him from taking food and drink. “Naturally, if I’m going to be shot,” he thought, “he won’t want to waste food and drink as well as a cartridge. But am I going to be shot? Does he intend to kill me? How am I to dodge it, if he does? I can’t refuse to go with him. That would bring things to a crisis at once. I must go with him, and look alive and trust to my luck. The worse I expect, the better I shall find.”
The man led the way out of the village, across the river, where the Indians were bathing, to a narrow path through a cane-brake. The set of the path was to the south and west, which Hi knew could not be the course for Santa Barbara.
“This can’t be the way,” Hi said. “Santa Barbara must be north and east of this.”
“Of course it is,” the man said. “But this is the way. It swings north after a bit, but anyway you have to go west first of all, to clear the marshes. All the mountain water which isn’t soaked up by the trees seeps out at the foothills and makes marsh. You’d better let me lead you.”
“Lead the way, then,” said Hi. “It’s jolly good of you to trouble.” He thought that at any rate it was jolly good to have the man with the gun in front of him. The path was a well-trodden, very narrow Indian track, running irregularly between walls of high growing canes, which glittered and rattled. They had hard golden shafts from which pale sheaths, like corn-husks, peeled. High up, seven feet above his head, their shoots were bluish or seemed bluish from the sky above; while the sky in the narrow gash above was greenish from their yellowness. The path curved in and out, exactly as the leader of the tribe had swerved from snag or snake long years before, when the Indians had first gone that way. It was impossible to keep direction after the first few minutes. The most that Hi could say was that he never headed to the east, because he never had the sun in his eyes.
“We’ll keep forest habits, going,” the man said. “We’ll not speak on the trail.”
Hi was much relieved at not having to talk. He watched the man’s back in front of him, going on and on with the head down. “What is the brute thinking?” Hi wondered. “How soon he shall turn round and bowl me over? Or what a neat job he made of Wigmore and how it can be bettered? Or is he debating whether I’m too much of a kid to bother about? As to that, I wouldn’t mind betting that he’s made up his mind to do for me. The question is, when?”