“Christopher,” I asked, “do you know what they are going to do with Mr. Vancouver?”
He omitted his formula, and simply gazed at me.
Then I told him, in raw, sore words. It was the first time they had been spoken by a member of the colony.
I was astonished at his placidity on hearing them.
“Do you understand?” I had to thunder the question above the outer din.
But he was listening to sounds that the storm did not make. I waited impatiently.
“They won’t him, sir, if they get you.”
“Why not?”
“You’re younger ‘n’ fatter.”
Like most other of Christopher’s remarks, this one dealt in a conclusive terminal, omitting postulate and explication; but I understood. He had told a long and dramatic story in those halting words—our blind assault, our being beaten down and secured, and then the awful end. I wondered at that, and longed for the power to see into the working of his strangely luminous mind, its far light behind its frontal darkness.