As he halted she came closer, and addressed him quickly, breathlessly. «I saw you pass two hours since. But I dursn't be seen speaking to you in daylight here in the street. So I have been on the watch for your return. Don't go on, Captain. You are walking into danger; walking to your death.»
At last his puzzled mind recognized her: and before the eyes of his memory flashed a scene enacted a week ago at The King of France. Two drunken ruffians had quarrelled over a woman — a fragment of the human wreckage of Europe washed up on the shores of the New World — an unfortunate creature of a certain comeliness, which, however, like the castoff finery she wore, was tarnished, soiled, and crumpled. The woman, arrogating a voice in a dispute of which she was the object, was brutally struck by one of her companions, and Blood, upon an impulse of chivalrous anger, had felled her assailant and escorted her from the place.
«They're lying in wait for you down yonder,» she was saying, «and they mean to kill you.»
«Who does?» he asked her, Mademoiselle d'Ogeron's words of warning sharply recalled.
«There's a score of them. And if they was to know — if they was to see me here a–warning you — my own throat would be cut before morning.»
She peered fearfully about her through the gloom as she spoke, and fear quivered in her voice. Then she cried out huskily, as if with mounting terror.
«Oh, don't let us stand here! Come with me; I'll make you safe until daylight. Then you can go back to your ship, and if you're wise you'll stay on board after this, or else come ashore in company. Come!» she ended, and caught him by the sleeve.
«Whisht now! Whisht!» said he, resisting the pressure on his arm. «Whither will you be taking me!»
«Oh, what odds, so long as I make you safe?» She was dragging on him with all her weight. «You was kind to me, and I can't leave you to be killed. And we'll both be murdered unless you come.»
Yielding at last, as much for her sake as his own, he allowed her to lead him from the wide street into the byway from which she had issued to intercept him. It was a narrow lane with little one–storied houses that were mostly timber standing at wide intervals along one side of it. Along the other ran a palisade enclosing a plantation.