“Then it was all a trick?” asked Maurice.
“Well, in a way. You would have been left to think that I was dead, as a warning to you against playing the fool, I suppose, but what I was really picked out for was a very serious matter—getting your ransom. The brutes over-reached themselves utterly in the way they went to work, and the result is that here I am.”
“What a lot you must have to tell us!” said Zoe. “Wait till we get to the camp, so that we can listen comfortably.”
“Why, you must have spent the day in house-building!” said Wylie, as they reached the clearing.
“That’s exactly what we did—to drown our misery,” said Maurice. “Now begin. Did they pretend to shoot you, or any vile trick like that?”
“No, only cuffed and hustled me down these goat-tracks for ever so far, which was no joke with my eyes covered and my hands tied. I really do wonder that I’m here to tell the tale, for I did more slipping than walking. At last we seemed to come to a comparatively level place, and they took the handkerchief off my eyes and set me free, and instructed me to make the best of my way back to civilisation and tell your friends to send fifteen thousand pounds by this day month if they wanted to see you again alive.”
“Fifteen thousand pounds!” gasped Zoe.
“Yes, it sounds a large order, but that wasn’t what stumped me. It was that I really know nothing about you, except that I gather you have a place in Homeshire. I know that Smith was at Cambridge and won a prize for poetry, but I could hardly go there and open a subscription list, or ask the Dons to mortgage the college revenues for his ransom, could I? It sounds absurd that after all we have gone through together we should know so little about each other, and I couldn’t make my guards believe it. They evidently thought that we lived next door to one another at home, or something of that sort, and laboured to explain to me that if there had been only three of us they would have made us write a letter, but as there were four, they sent one of us instead. But at last I managed to make them understand that nothing could induce me to show my face in Therma without proper credentials, and that unless I knew who to apply to, there would be no chance of their getting the money, so they decided to send back here for instructions. But when it came to the point, neither of them would be left alone with me, and as I declined to remain where I was and wait for them, the only thing to do was to bring me back.”
“You said you were no longer blindfolded?” said Eirene, for Maurice and Zoe were looking at one another in consternation. “Ah, yes, that is it. The guards were afraid of you—of your eyes. They hate them.”
“Horribly bad taste in them,” said Wylie lightly. “Why, here’s our friend Milosch coming—bringing us something for supper, I see.”