“Is you not ’fraid,” said the botanist, quietly helping himself to a marrow-bone, “to leave you’s darter at Simpson’s Gully?”
“Who told you I left her there?” asked Bevan, with increasing asperity.
“Oh! I only t’ink so, as you’s come from dere.”
“An’ why should I be afraid?”
“Because, me frund, de contry be full ob scoundrils.”
“Yes, an’ you are one of the biggest of them,” thought Fred Westly, but he kept his thoughts to himself, while Paul muttered something about being well protected, and having no occasion to be afraid.
Perceiving the subject to be distasteful, the stranger quickly changed it. Soon afterwards each man, rolling himself in his blanket, went to sleep—or appeared to do so. In regard to Paddy Flinders, at least, there could be no doubt, for the trombone-tones of his nose were eloquent. Paul, too, lay on his back with eyes tight shut and mouth wide open, while the regular heaving of his broad chest told that his slumbers were deep. But more than once Fred Westly raised his head gently and looked suspiciously round. At last, in his case also, tired Nature asserted herself, and his deep regular breathing proved that the “sweet restorer” was at work, though an occasional movement showed that his sleep was not so profound as that of his comrades.
The big botanist remained perfectly motionless from the time he lay down, as if the sleep of infancy had passed with him into the period of manhood. It was not till the fire had died completely down, and the moon had set, leaving only the stars to make darkness visible, that he moved. He did so, not as a sleeper awaking, but with the slow stealthy action of one who is already wide awake and has a purpose in view.
Gradually his huge shoulders rose till he rested on his left elbow.
A sense of danger, which had never left him even while he slept, aroused Fred, but he did not lose his self-possession. He carefully watched, from the other side of the extinct fire, the motions of the stranger, and lay perfectly still—only tightening his grasp on the knife-handle that he had been instinctively holding when he dropped asleep.