The girl's face seemed shrunken, and shone white in the bluish shade of her bonnet.
"There was a car," she stammered softly. "I didn't look. Was it——"
"Looked like Melchard driving," answered Dick. "I'd half a mind to take you out into the lane at the back. But it's safest amongst the crowd. And I must know whether——"
The crowd had grown dense before the open gates of the stable-yard, and Dick's words were interrupted by the sudden outbreak of a quarrel in the heart of it.
To a running chorus of jeers, expostulation, and fierce incentives to retaliation, there came in sight, pushing his way through the crush, a creature whose appearance immediately struck Dick and Amaryllis as ominous of danger.
The man, although of middle height and erect carriage, had so vast a spread and depth of chest, development of the deltoid muscles so unusual, and length of arm so unnatural as to establish the effect at once of power and deformity; to which the yellow skin, high cheek-bones, small eyes, and the thin black moustaches, drooping long and perpendicular from each corner of the broken-toothed mouth, added an expression of cruelty so unmitigated that Amaryllis turned sick at the sight, closing her eyes in dreadful disgust; while the European leather and cloth costume of a chauffeur not only added horror to the outlandish figure, but gave Dick Bellamy almost the certainty that here was yet another accomplice of Alban Melchard.
As the monster drew near, making his way savagely towards the stables, there thrust himself in the way Bob Woodfall, the good-natured champion of the village—six feet two inches and fourteen stone of bone and muscle, good cricket and five years' war record, dressed in country-made flannels, ready for his place in the Ecclesthorpe team.
"Hey, man!" he cried good-naturedly. "Be no manner o' sense bargin' thro' decent throng like a blasty tank into half battalion o' lousy Jerrys."
Then, quite close, the Malay turned his face full on Amaryllis, and Dick saw that its right ear had a large gold ring hanging from a hole in the lobe—a hole that was stretched by the mere weight of the metal to three times the size of its thickness.
But on the left side of the head was no ring to match, for the reason that no ear was there to support it. In some unclean strife in Hong-Kong or Zanzibar it had been torn away, leaving, to mark its place, only the orifice in the head, staring in ghastly isolation most horrible of all.