Anyway, not a single arrow was fired at me as I tore across the clearing.
The girl, hearing the noise behind, turned her head bewilderedly, and then, seeing me leaping over the stones, struggled to her feet. I don’t know what she took me for, but with the knife bare in my hand she probably thought me Death in some new form. But she stood there bravely facing me with steady eyes, her poor arms cruelly twisted behind her back, her red-gold hair falling in a loose bundle on one shoulder, her breath coming quickly between her parted lips.
I hadn’t breath to speak nor time to waste, and I didn’t definitely know what her language was, so I did the only possible thing. I put my arm round her and swung her to the ground as gently, but as quickly as I could, so that she would be the smaller target while I got her free.
I think she expected to feel the knife in her heart, and was amazed to be still alive. Anyway, she lay still, which was all I asked. I didn’t worry about her arms; what I wanted to see was her leg. And then to my horror I found that instead of a rope as I had hoped, she was fastened to the old man by a short length of chain riveted in each case to an iron ring round the ankle.
I think I put up some kind of incoherent prayer, and then bethought me of my pistol. I squatted with both feet on the chain, pulled out the big Colt forty-five automatic, pushed it up hard against the riveted boss on the ring round the old man’s ankle, and pressed the trigger. Did I mention, by the way, that the old man was stone dead with two inches of the arrow sticking through his ribs over the heart? His being dead helped me, since I had not to worry where the bullet went.
The recoil nearly dislocated my wrist, but I saw that the rivet had smashed away, and with a violent wrench I pulled the chain free.
My hasty glance at the girl’s arm, smothered in many times knotted rope, had shown me that it would be quicker to carry her than try to free the knots in the green hide that bound her arms together. To have tried to make her run over the stones with her arms literally racked back, and a length of chain dangling from one ankle, would have been equally slow; she would have fallen time and again.
I put my left arm round her shoulders, my right under her knees, swung her up, and started at a slow jog-trot over the stones toward Payindah, and then an arrow flicked past us, to stand quivering in the ground beyond.
By this time doubtless the people inside had sized up me and my mission, and between the rifle-cracks I heard shouting in the gate. I had gone a matter of thirty yards when the girl said something I didn’t understand, but obviously to attract my attention backwards. Her head was resting on my left shoulder, so that she could just see over it.
I looked back. There was the little gate open and five men running over the stones after us, men in steel caps and short leather and mail jerkins.