Harding got up and flung back the door. His movement was so sudden, that a man who had crept up to the hut and was now leaning against the door had no time to recover himself, and staggered forward into the hut. Watch retreated, still growling fiercely, but restrained from attacking the stranger by a gesture of its master. Gray made a clutch at the gun above his head, but the next moment withdrew his hand. That pitiful, abject, trembling fugitive was not a man to take arms against.
The stranger staggered across the hut and crouched down against the opposite wall, breathing in short hurried pants. His face was painfully thin, and as white as death. From a long jagged wound, half hidden by his matted hair, blood was trickling in a dark slow stream. The clothes he wore were torn to tatters. You could see his skin through the rents.
He crouched back against the wall, hugging his arms against his breast, and looking from Gray to Harding with a wild agonized entreaty in his eyes. It was the look of a hunted animal appealing for mercy rather than the look of a man asking help of fellow-men. He was evidently unable to speak. He tried to articulate something, but his baked, blistered lips refused their office.
"He's just done for," said Gray. Harding nodded, and going up to the pannikin of cold tea on the shelf took out some in a cup and held it to the stranger's lips. He drank it up greedily and then words came to him.
"Don't give me up," he cried out in a strange hoarse scream, and fell along the floor huddled up in a dreadful heap.
The two men looked at each other.
"It's plain enough to see what he is," said Gray with a slight shrug of the shoulders. "Shall we have to entertain the rest of the gang, do you think?"
"The police, more likely, lad. They're close on his track, I fancy."
He bent over the man and straightened him out. Gray did not attempt to help him; he stood looking down at the wretched fugitive with a cold unsympathizing curiosity in his handsome face as he said:
"He isn't dead, is he?"