Rising with the help of his hand, she tried to smooth her rumpled feathers, and said:
"Hadn't we better go on?"
"I've got to move something from the car first," he replied, with ambiguity merely euphemistic. "You stand here and keep a look-out towards Harthborough."
"All right," she answered, understanding very well what he had to do. She turned away, and then, with an effort, her face still averted, "Can't I help you, Dick?" she asked.
"Yes—by sitting on that stone and not turning round till I let you."
And he went back to the car, taking the "Robbie Burns" with him.
In his shaken and exhausted condition, the task of dragging that revolting corpse from the car was not easy. Heavy he had known the body would be, but when he had opened the door on the off-side, and would have pulled the dead thing out by the heels, he was surprised to find that he could not move it. On a second effort the slight yielding of the mass was accompanied by a sound of rending and he remembered Mut-mut's right hand, armed with a weapon of unspeakable cruelty, which only once before in his life had he seen—the Mahratta baag-nouk, or Tiger's Claw.
He went round to the car's-near side, and there found, as he had expected, the dead right hand anchored to the lining-cushions by what was, he supposed, a unique specimen, made to the fancy of the creature that wore it; for, in addition to the leather strap across the back of the hand, two rings were welded to the instrument, through which to pass the second and third fingers, thus keeping in position the four short, razor-edged steel claws hidden in the palm.
Dick loosened the buckle of the strap, and drew the hand, already cold, from the rings; picked the baag-nouk from the cushion, wrapped it in a greasy cloth out of the tool-box, and hid it under the seat.
The thought of that gruesome weapon, more frightful than the unsheathed claws of the royalest Bengal tiger, hanging over the head of his chosen among women, stung Dick Bellamy to very unceremonious removal of the body, which, after rifling it of a handful of cartridges, he flung by the roadside; and then, lest Amaryllis should see the awful head again, even in death, he covered the whole corpse with an overcoat of Melchard's from the car.