"I'm awfully strong. I've felt perfectly safe, you see, ever since—since I was such a fool and you made me sleep and be sensible."
Dick looked about him, and caught sight of the stone roof of the cottage where the bees bumbled.
"I didn't get far before I crumpled," he said. "Let's get a move on."
As they walked with their eyes on the cleft knob of the ridge, he reverted to her last words.
"Not scared any more? Then what price Melchard?" he asked, "and malingering pig-tailed wenches that hide their faces and sob on their daddies' shoulders?"
"It was that frightful Chinaman, Dick. Yes, I was afraid then. I was afraid—afraid you'd——"
"Take him on? Nothin' doing," he answered. "I should've stood just a dog's chance against the village hero, my dear girl, and the Malay made just one bite of him. Next time that lopsided serang looms on the horizon, you won't see me for dust and small stones."
The tone, perhaps, more than the words in which the man of whom she could not help making a hero seemed to disparage himself, annoyed Miss Caldegard.
It was as if one good friend of hers had maligned another, and she could not quarrel with the traducer without falling out with the traduced.
"But it was Melchard's voice that made you take a lump of me between your teeth and bite a hole in my coat," he went on. "There's a hideous wound just under this." And he picked at two broken threads on his shoulder.