"Let me be!" cocking the revolver. "Stand aside, any one of you who does not want to be shot. But if I shoot this wild beast to bits, inch by inch, I will know where Cyprian is to-night."
This, Ferlie, the long-suffering and so-compassionate of all human pain. There may have been an hour, far back in some forgotten life, when she stood, herself a half-savage incarnation of Womanhood, surrounded by her slaves, directing the slow doing-to-death of a feudal enemy who had deprived her of mate or son.
Whether or no, the present captive, who had obviously never set eyes until that moment on a white woman, was startled by the impression that she was an avenging devil, it was certain he considered her supernatural.
He broke shuddering from his gaolers to prostrate himself at her feet in crawling supplication.
In due time they extracted from him a promise to lead them to "the place where they had put the white man."
Yes, the white man had come there in the boat. Yes, he had walked in the jungle. Yes, he had been captured. The rest was not clear.
Jellybrand saw that, although they might be moving directly into a trap, there was nothing for it but to go on. Everybody understood that there would probably be a scrap. They must rely upon the terrorizing effect of their fire-arms. He stopped to make the sign of the cross.
Ferlie noticed that unsympathetically. She felt insanely cruel, and he avoided those wild eyes.
It was not long before they arrived at a fired clearing, the centre of which showed the remains of an earth-oven. A low bamboo platform, beyond, supported a primitive hammock of plaited grass, hung round with queer indistinguishable objects.
The whole thing suggested a funeral pyre; not an unlikely idea, since the padre knew that the Jarawas in the Andamans burnt the bodies of their dead.