And his father would be there. She would have to tell him.... How could she save Archie? If payment was claimed, it was she who must pay. She would force him to be prudent, to cover up the traces of blood, to plan an escape.
At any moment, one of the carriers, released from work, wandering afield looking for wild honey, might stumble on the corpse. She braced herself for action and told Changalilo to collect the natives. Anxiously she counted them; they were all there. How could she keep them from the place of death?
'Tell them,' she bade the servant, 'to-night it will rain. They must thatch their shelters, now, without waiting.'
She showed him where they were to pull the grass for thatching. She stood over them to see they did not wander. Changalilo asked if he should prepare Archie's bath. Where could Archie be all this time? By now it was nearly dark. Changalilo said he had heard shots, the last one just audible. The Bwana, he suggested, had wounded and followed game.
His words evoked a fresh horror. That distant gun! For a terrible moment she saw a second figure in the lonely hills, lying in its blood.
She shut the image out. Archie, of all men, however little he wished to live, would not leave her on this haunted shore to face starvation alone. She wondered if he had collapsed from fever alone in the bush. Only fear of what the natives might find on their way stopped her from leading a search party.
It seemed that hours passed before the sound of slow footsteps in the dead leaves fell on her ear and Archie's bowed figure crossed the circle of the firelight. Even in the reddish glow his face was pale and he walked as if each motion called for a separate effort of will.
She moved to meet him, to take his hand, but he kept his eyes turned to the ground and carried his gun to the shelter. She heard the bed creak under his weight. She had no inkling of the baseness he had read into her acts, and only her respect for his obvious wish to be left alone stopped her following him. Could he not see the urgent need to give the natives some reason for Dick's ... absence? To forestall curiosity? Talk spread through the villages and from the villages might reach a Boma. Inquiry would follow, the carriers would be sent for and the story pieced together. She forced herself to keep quiet, crediting Archie with agony of conscience that he did not, in fact, feel.
When she could endure inactivity no longer, she crossed to the shelter and looked in. Archie was sitting on his bed, his chin dug into his chest and his rifle across his knees.
'Archie,' she said softly.