“Which of them are you after?” asked his blank, unringing voice.
She continued to look at him; her face had stiffened into a severe mask; she managed to say distinctly:
“I suppose you have been asking yourself that question for some time, Captain Jorgenson?”
“No. I am asking you now.”
His face disclosed nothing to Mrs. Travers' bold and weary eyes. “What could you do over there?” Jorgenson added as merciless, as irrepressible, and sincere as though he were the embodiment of that inner voice that speaks in all of us at times and, like Jorgenson, is offensive and difficult to answer.
“Remember that I am not a shadow but a living woman still, Captain Jorgenson. I can live and I can die. Send me over to share their fate.”
“Sure you would like?” asked the roused Jorgenson in a voice that had an unexpected living quality, a faint vibration which no man had known in it for years. “There may be death in it,” he mumbled, relapsing into indifference.
“Who cares?” she said, recklessly. “All I want is to ask Tom a question and hear his answer. That's what I would like. That's what I must have.”
II
Along the hot and gloomy forest path, neglected, overgrown and strangled in the fierce life of the jungle, there came a faint rustle of leaves. Jaffir, the servant of princes, the messenger of great men, walked, stooping, with a broad chopper in his hand. He was naked from the waist upward, his shoulders and arms were scratched and bleeding. A multitude of biting insects made a cloud about his head. He had lost his costly and ancient head-kerchief, and when in a slightly wider space he stopped in a listening attitude anybody would have taken him for a fugitive.