CHAPTER III
The mountains still stemmed the morning sunlight when Archie, who had dressed by the ashes of his fire, sat down to await the arrival of the guide who was to lead the way down the hills. Until he came there seemed no object in waking Brown or whatever his real name was.
By nature incurious, Archie could not help suspecting that there was something wrong about the man. It was not natural to find so feckless a being alone in the wilds. He seemed, moreover, to have something to conceal. Archie liked them with less looks and more honesty. What the devil had he been doing in the middle of the night with his gun? A queer bird.
But the man was in a hole—a baddish hole—and out here it was up to one white man to help another. He began to make plans. Most of them were blocked by the man's wife. You couldn't ask a woman to do too much. What sort of a wife would the chap have? Something fair and fluffy and adoring, he decided. He wasn't too sure they were married. That would explain some of the mystery ... not that it was any of his business.
As he came to this fallacious conclusion, the thin sweetness of whistling trickled through the quiet of the forest like tinsel against night.
'Another white man,' thought Archie. 'The place is like Piccadilly.' Then he reflected that Mrs. Brown must be coming up the hill to join her husband and wondered with a twist of his lip whether she would have the presence of mind to answer to that name.
The whistling started again, closer. Why did that syncopated phrase bring the colour of emeralds before his eyes? Were the words about emeralds? More like Kentucky, Tennessee, and the rest of the rural spots that American song writers ache to revisit.
Then he remembered: it was an emerald green shawl crossed tightly over a woman's flexible shoulders. The fringe hung to the ankle whose silk-clad movement caught and lost the light as her foot tapped to the rhythm. Her back was framed in the lighted blank of a long window that gave on to the London street where he stood smoking. Dawn was near, and a grey light invaded the ball-room, revealing the pallor of the electricity, the withering of the flowers, the weariness of the women.
She had half turned to her companion, and Archie, invisible in the square, had rested his gaze on the silhouetted curve of her cheek. She moved again, and it gripped his heart to see how tired her eyes were. What a little thing she looked with her figure held firmly by that emerald shawl!
Funny how the whistled tune recalled that picture of Norah and all that sort of life.... Ah, well! in a few months now, when the cattle deal was through and the ivory sold, he'd have made her happy by taking her back. The price of ivory must be somewhere about twelve shillings now, but...