Crouching over Sunlocks in the darkness of that grim vault, Jason heard these words as the guards rode past him in the glare of the hot sun, and not until they were gone did he draw his breath. But just as he lay back with a sigh of relief, thinking all danger over, suddenly he heard a sound that startled him. It was the sniffing of a dog outside his hiding place, and at the next instant two glittering eyes looked in upon him from the gap whereby he had entered.
The dog growled, and Jason tried to pacify it. It barked, and then Jason laid hold of it, and gripped it about the throat to silence it. It fumed and fought, but Jason held it like a vice, until there came a whistle and a call, and then it struggled afresh.
"Erik!" shouted a voice without. "Erik, Erik!" and then whistle followed whistle.
Thinking the creature would now follow its master, Jason was for releasing it, but before he had yet fully done so the dog growled and barked again.
"Erik! Erik!" shouted the voice outside, and from the click-clack of hoofs Jason judged that one of the men was returning.
Then Jason saw that there was nothing left to him but to quiet the dog, or it would betray them to their death; so, while the brute writhed in his great hands, struggling to tear the flesh from them, he laid hold of its gaping jaws and rived them apart and broke them. In a moment more the dog was dead.
In the silence that followed, a faint voice came from a distance, crying, "Sigurd, Sigurd, why are you waiting!"
And then another voice shouted back from near at hand—very near, so near as to seem to be on top of the hummock, "I've lost the dog; and I could swear I heard him growling somewhere hereabouts not a minute since."
Jason was holding his breath again, when suddenly a deep sigh came from Sunlocks; then another, and another, and then some rambling words that had no meaning, but made a dull hum in that hollow place. The man outside must have heard something, for he called his dog again.
At that Jason's heart fell low, and all he could do he did—he reached over the outstretched form of his comrade, and put his lips to the lips of Sunlocks, just that he might smother their deadly babble with noiseless kisses.