“How do you propose to go—walk?”
“Walk!” He laughed—a laugh which wasn’t nice to hear. “I haven’t walked for twenty years—since they burned my legs off so that I shouldn’t. When the Great Joss goes abroad he travels in his palanquin—there it is. And as he passes the people throw themselves on to the ground and hide their faces in the dust, lest, at the sight of his godlike form, they should fall dead. You’ll have to fetch your chaps, and be quick about it! They’ll have to carry me, and I’ll stuff the palanquin as full as it will hold with the things which are best worth taking. I know ’em!”
I reflected for a moment. Then turned to Luke.
“Do you think you can find your way to Rudd?”
The girl interposed.
“Let me go; I shall be surer—and quicker.”
“You can’t go alone; they won’t take their orders from you.” An idea occurred to me. “I’ll come with you, and we’ll take as many things with us as we can carry. Luke, you stay behind and help Mr. Batters put the things together in convenient parcels. I doubt if there’ll be enough of us to take everything. Pick out the best. As time’s precious, what we can’t take we shall have to leave behind.”
I crammed my pockets with the smaller odds and ends, none the less valuable, perhaps, because they were small. I packed a lot of other things into a sort of sheet which I slung over my shoulder. The girl stowed as much as she could carry into the skirt of her queer fashioned gown. She held it up as children do their pinafores. Out we went into the night.
As we hurried along my breath came faster even than the pace warranted at the thought of being alone in the darkness with her.
We went some way before a word was spoken. Then I asked a question.