The engine had run down. As he cranked it up, Dick was seized by a sudden savage desire to have in his hands the man who had brought all his outrage, suffering and terror to the girl whose uncovered head and patient back he could see waiting for him down the road.
A fierce rage, such as he had seldom felt, and never since boyhood, flooded his body with a dry heat, and stimulated his intelligence.
For with these thoughts of the evil Melchard came sudden insight into the man's purpose at the foot of the Bull's Neck, and his probable action at the present moment.
"He was shooting to drive us into Mut-mut's arms, and to make us believe our danger was all behind us," he reasoned. "And it's a white elephant to a dead rat he's trudging up this road now to find what Mut-mut's left of us. Perhaps he's heard the two shots, and me cranking up."
Not daring to call Amaryllis, he trusted her precise obedience to his orders, and sank, almost as swiftly as Pépe into the landscape.
Crouching, crawling, worming himself on his belly from tree-stump to boulder he mounted some ten feet above the road on the side away from the car, and then, invisible from the road level, continued his course until he had retraced about fifty yards of the way they had travelled.
Then he stopped, lying prone where two rocks, standing so little apart that they seemed long years ago to have formed a single mass, gave him view of the road's whole width.
He laid one ear against the rock, and over the other a hand.
After a minute's waiting, footsteps; three more, and a weary figure came in sight where the level road began.
The joy he felt kept him patient until Melchard, unmistakable, was right beneath him.