Just at sunset she received a sudden shock. With the skies all clear and no sight of enemies about, she stepped out on the rocky ledge for a breath of air. She had not been there a minute when on a ridge fully half a mile away, she spied a lone figure walking slowly.
“He’s no soldier,” she told herself, lifting binoculars to her eyes. “Some native in a long, black robe,” she decided. “And,” she caught her breath—“he walks as if he were a little lame in both feet.”
At that instant, as if he had caught a flash of light from her glasses, as indeed he might have done, the lone walker quickened his strange, halting steps to disappear behind the ridge.
“It’s strange,” Gale said to Jan a moment later. “Twice before I have seen such a man,—once up there in the temple at the edge of the city.”
“He was the one who locked Isabelle in the room of Absolute Silence and tried to poison you with incense fumes,” Jan suggested.
“That’s what we thought,” Gale said. “Of course, we couldn’t prove it.”
“And the other time he was with the woman in purple,” said Jan.
“That’s right. Can you tie that! Last night it was the woman in purple we saw in a temple! And now it’s the two-legged cripple again!”
“Looks as if they were shadowing us,” said Jan with a shudder. “Gives me the willies.”
“They’ll get shadowed,” Gale declared. “Isabelle probably has set the army intelligence service on them by now.”