Peter Halket looked up at him; the man seemed dead. He touched him softly on the arm, then shook it slightly.
The man opened his eyes slowly, without raising his head; and looked at Peter from under his weary eyebrows. Except that they moved they might have been the eyes of a dead thing.
Peter put up his fingers to his own lips—“Hus-h! hus-h!” he said.
The man hung torpid, still looking at Peter.
Quickly Peter Halket knelt down and took the knife from his belt. In an instant the riems that bound the feet were cut through; in another he had cut the riems from the waist and neck: the riems dropped to the ground from the arms, and the man stood free. Like a dazed dumb creature, he stood, with his head still down, eyeing Peter.
Instantly Peter slipped the red bundle from his arm into the man’s passive hand.
“Ari-tsemaia! Hamba! Loop! Go!” whispered Peter Halket; using a word from each African language he knew. But the black man still stood motionless, looking at him as one paralysed.
“Hamba! Sucka! Go!” he whispered, motioning his hand.
In an instant a gleam of intelligence shot across the face; then a wild transport. Without a word, without a sound, as the tiger leaps when the wild dogs are on it, with one long, smooth spring, as though unwounded and unhurt, he turned and disappeared into the grass. It closed behind him; but as he went the twigs and leaves cracked under his tread.
The Captain threw back the door of his tent. “Who is there?” he cried.