“How can you tell?”
“I’ve kept watches nearly every day and night for ten years. I can tell time within a minute or two. And to think that we met at Los Xicales and never knew! I was misled by your name. Why did you not speak? You heard my name.”
“Remember I did not know your name,” she said. “I have always thought that your name was Chisholm. I never once heard you called Harker. You were Chisholm to me.”
“Ah! I was afraid of that,” he said. “You never got my letter?”
“Never.”
They were silent for a few seconds; in the stillness some ash dropped from the fuse with a feathery fall: down in the town a cock crowed.
“Strange,” he said. “There is a cock crowing. I cannot hear a cock without knowing that I have an immortal soul.”
“It is a live cry,” she said.
“It is like a trumpeter trumpeting the graves open. It’s the cry the dead will rise with.
“Ah!” he cried, bitterly. “And the living are rising with it, and going out to their work, while we are lashed here like staysails. Oh, if I could only heave this pillar down!” He swayed from side to side, but was too tightly lashed: there was no stirring that tree bole tamped in four feet below the floor.