I nodded, and tried to look afraid. Perhaps the speculation that the last boast started in my mind helped give me a look that convinced her.
Fred began calling again.
"You go!" she ordered imperiously, with a last effort to impress me with her mental predominance. "Go quickly!"
I made motions of hand and face as nearly suggestive of underhanded cunning as I could compass, and climbed out through the window without further invitation. Seeing me emerge, Fred beckoned from fifty yards away and turned his back. Morning was just beginning to descend into the valley, suddenly bright from having finished all the dawn delays among the crags higher up; but there were deep shadows here and especially where one roof overhung another.
Jumping from roof to roof to follow Fred, I was suddenly brought up short by a figure in shadow that gesticulated wildly without speaking. It was below me, in a narrow, shallow runway between two houses, and I had been so impressed by my interview with Maga that assassination was the first thought ready to mind. I sprang aside and tried to check myself, missed footing, and fell into the very runway I had tried to avoid.
A friend unmistakable, Anna—Gloria's self-constituted maid—ran out of the darkest shadow and kept me from scrambling to my feet.
"Wait!" she whispered. "Don't be seen talking to me. Listen!"
My ankle pained considerably and I was out of breath. I was willing enough to lie there.
"Maga has made a plot to betray Zeitoon! She has been talking with that Turkish colonel who was captured. I don't know what the plot is, but I listened through a chink in the wall of the prison, and I heard him promise that she should have Will Yerkes!"
"What else did you hear?"