The sound stopped; and Archie, leaning forward, saw James standing half-way up the ascent, with his back turned towards him, looking out across the flats. He knew what his thoughts were. He drew his right sleeve lower. So long as he did not stretch out his arm the mark could not be seen.
He did not want to appear as if he were watching Logie, so he made a slight sound, and the other turned quickly and faced him, hidden from the waist downwards in the broom. Then his crooked lip moved, and he came up the bank and threw himself down beside Flemington.
[CHAPTER VII
TREACHERY]
JAMES did not look as if he had been up all night, though he had spent the most part of it on foot with Ferrier. The refreshment of morning had bathed him too, but he was still harassed in mind by some of the occurrences of the last few hours. Last night he had seen the mark on the wrist stretched suddenly between himself and his friend, and had understood its significance. It was the mark that he had put there. As the two men listened to the flying footsteps that mystified them by their doublings in the darkness, it had dawned upon them that the intruder skulking behind the windlass and the tipsy reveller prone in the close were one and the same person. The drunkard was a very daring spy, as sober as themselves.
“You are out betimes,” said Archie, with friendly innocence.
“I often am,” replied James simply.
Archie pulled up a blade of grass and began to chew it meditatively.
“I see your long night has done you good,” began Logie. “There were many things I should have liked to ask you, yesterday evening, but you went away so early that I could not.”
Silence dropped upon the two: upon Logie, because his companion’s manner last night had hinted at remembrances buried in regret and painful to dig up; on Flemington, because he knew the value of that impression, and because he would fain put off the moment when the more complete deception of the man whose sympathetic attitude he divined and whose generosity of soul was so obvious, must begin. He did not want to come to close quarters with James. He had hunted him and been hunted by him, but he had not yet been obliged to lie to him by word of mouth; and he had no desire to do so, here and now, in cold blood and in the face of all this beauty and peace.