CHAPTER XXV. LARKIN RETIRES FROM BUSINESS.
When Fred Larkin grasped the full significance of the situation in which he found himself, on awaking in the Manchurian hut, he felt that he was nearer death than ever before in all his hardy, adventurous life. At Santiago, indeed, he had thought himself led out to execution, but this had proved to be a mistake. The Spaniards were but conducting him, under a flag of truce, to the American lines, where he was exchanged for a prisoner of war, one of their own countrymen. In this lonely hovel, in one of the remotest and dreariest districts of Manchuria, cut off from all hope of help, not only by the leagues that lay between him and the travelled road to Feng-Weng-Chang, but by the storm which now shook the hut with its fierce blasts; surrounded by lawless men who thirsted for gold and cared not a whiff from their pipes for a human life; trapped by the cunning guide, and completely at the mercy of his wolfish captors as he lay before them pinioned hand and foot; he realised in a swift flash of thought that he could be saved by little short of a miracle. Still he would try. He was not a man to give up while the faintest shred of hope remained.
"What do you want, Kanuka?" he asked quietly, looking his treacherous guide straight in the eye.
The villain hesitated, and Fred knew his life hung by a hair. The blade did not fall.
"We want everything you have, everything!" said Kanuka. "If you resist we kill you."
"You would gain nothing by that," said the prisoner. "I am perfectly helpless. Who are—your friends?"
"They are not my friends; they are my men. If I lift my finger to them, you are dead. Is it not so?" he added, turning to the motley crew and speaking in his own tongue.
A low snarl went round the circle, and they showed their teeth. They drew still nearer, and fingered the hafts of their knives, which Fred could see sticking in their girdles. Two of the men carried guns. One of the band, younger than the rest, seemed to have no weapons, and remained in the background. The old woman had succeeded in getting possession of the watch and dangled it so that the light shone upon it.
"I don't doubt your word, Kanuka," observed Fred in the same calm, even tones. "Those followers of yours seem quite willing to finish up the job. But you know better than that. You are an intelligent man."