When Sam Bunce returned, he had a straw in one corner of his mouth, and was leading a sturdy roadster, with whom he seemed already on terms of intimacy.
Mr. Dixon Mallaby, meantime, had introduced himself to Amaryllis, getting, for his pains, but the Araminta of the sun-bonnet; and Dick, when he and the ostler had harnessed Tod in his lonely distinction, went round to find her the centre of an admiring group competing, it seemed, for her company in the brake; the girl answering with "Na-ay!" "Na-ay, thank 'ee kindly," and "Thank 'ee, sir, Ah'll ask feyther," with a genuine flush on her face due to fear of speech rather than of men, which did much to heighten her attraction for these kindly labourers and mechanics.
"You be set on box 'long o' me," said Dick, and took her not too gently by the arm.
But his way was barred by a red-faced cricketer in strange flannels.
"'Tis not every Ecclesthorpe fixture," he said, "as we gets a comely wench for maascot. Us be trustin' our hossflesh to you——"
"Hosses is Grudgers', an' t' lass is mine," interrupted Dick, smiling.
"But there be Parson Mallaby to make we mind our manners," objected Redface.
"T' cloth," said Dick, "is a good thing. And blood's a better," and so marched his daughter to the front of the brake.
As the last of the team were climbing to their seats, a motor-cycle with a side-car, coming from the north, pulled up behind them.
"Don't turn your head," whispered Dick on the box to Amaryllis beside him. "They'll pass us soon, if they're Melchard's men. I had to yank you up here, you little devil, or you'd have cooked the whole show by laughing. You were shaking like a jelly, and they thought you were afraid of me. You! With your 'Naays' and your 'Thank 'ee kindlys!'"
A tall man in motor-cycling overalls, goggles pushed up over his cap, sauntered leisurely past the brake from behind, on its off side. From the near-side box-seat Amaryllis saw him, and then looked down at the splash-board, shaking her head.
"Nay, daddy, na-ay!" she said in a clear drawl, imitating Dick's. "Always feared, Ah be, o' talkin', when there's a many men makin' simple jests. That were a gradely word o' yourn, 'Cloth be a fine thing, but blood's a better!'"
And she finished with a low, cooing chuckle.
Then, loud and clear, came the parson's voice.
"You can let 'em go now, Mr. Bunce," he said.
The stableman stood away from Tod's bridle, and the three horses put their necks into their collars like one.
A little chorus of approbation rose from the body of the brake; the man in the middle of the road jumped aside, cursing.
As they passed him, gathering pace, "That's one of 'em," muttered Dick.
"He'll go into 'The Goat in Boots' and hear all about us," said Amaryllis.
"I don't think he'll want to draw too much attention to himself," said Dick. "But if he does go in, Ned Blossom and the two hayseeds in the bar'll tell him all about Sam Bunce."
"Do you think he really believes in Bunce?" asked the girl.
"He believes already in three pounds, and the next drink'll make him believe in everything."
"Youareclever," said Amaryllis, "and it's awfully funny."
"You," said Dick, "are astonishing."
"Why?" asked the girl.
"You laugh all the time, as if——"
"As if I weren't afraid? I'm not," she answered. "But it's not courage. It's you. I feel safe."
For a moment Dick was silent; then he said:
"My leader's a good little nag, isn't he?"
"Yes. He likes you."
"How d'you know?"
"He feels you through the lines. He's not used to being all alone out there, but he's only tried to look round once, and then all you did was to talk to him, and he said to himself: 'He'sall right'—waggled his head a little and broke into his jolly canter again."
"I'll show you what they can do, after that side-car has passed."
"Will they come after us?"
Two or three back-fire explosions answered her, and very soon the motor-cycle and side-car tore past the brake, alarming with its insolent speed even Dick's sober and industrious leader.
The machine was soon out of sight.
"Did they mean to scare poor Tod?" asked Amaryllis.
"He's only disgusted. No," said Dick. "All that fuss and stink is to get 'em to Gallowstree Dip before we pass it."
"But they don't know we're here," she objected.
"They don't know anything. If we turn off towards Harthborough Junction, or if anyone leaves the brake to walk that way, they'll follow."
"Wasn't there to be a picket at Harthborough itself?" asked the girl.
"Yes. But they haven't made contact with it yet, and don't even know whether it's arrived. If it hadn't and we went that way, we could nip into the first train and get clean away. But when this picket sees us driving straight on to Ecclesthorpe, they'll sit down at the Dip to wait till we never come. I shall spring the Dip at such a pace that these flannelled fools'll yell like a school-treat, and the picket'll forget 'em."
"But why should they even suspect?"
"They're ordered to suspect everything. They've never seen either the man or the woman they're after. They see one woman and a lot of men on a beanfeast, and she's got to pass on to the next picket to be accounted for."
"Then why didn't you make Mother Brundage dress me up as a boy?"
"Because like this you may be somebody else. In trousers, these blokes would shoot you on sight. My dear child," said Dick, "there are a good many men that could masquerade as women, but not one young woman in ten thousand can look anything but painfully ridiculous in a suit of dittoes."
Amaryllis was not quite sure whether or not to be offended, but remembered her hair, and was comforted.
The road now began to drop away in front of them so sharply that Tod had no work to do. A little further, and the slow trot, which gentle use of the foot-break had made possible, was reduced to a reluctant, pastern-racking walk, with slack traces and strained collar-chains for the wheelers; while the leader, too much at leisure, began to remember his loneliness.
And then, as they rounded an acute bend at the steepest point of the grade, Amaryllis saw below her, just beyond the bridge of grey stone from which their road began its ascent to the moor, a single ancient oak-tree, from the twisted trunk of which was stretched out across the by-road which followed the course of the bridged stream, that cruel, heavy arm, upon which in one day were hanged fifteen of Sir Thomas Wyatt's rebels in days popularly supposed merrier than ours.
Near the foot of this evil old tree, worthy of its huge bough, the girl saw the two men whose behaviour had offended Tod, pretending themselves occupied with some defect of side-car or cycle. By the time that Dick had brought his team within a hundred and fifty yards of the bottom, he could see that the interest of his two enemies had been diverted from their own vehicle to his: they stood erect with their backs to the oak, each hiding a hand in a right-side pocket.
Whether they had gathered matter of suspicion at "The Goat in Boots," whether they would dare, here in peaceful English country, so desperate an attempt as shooting him and Amaryllis as they passed the Dip, were questions Dick could not answer. But the goggles were down, masking the faces, while he and the girl, perched high on the box, made fine targets for a pair of Brownings.
He turned in his seat and spoke to his passengers, catching Dixon Mallaby's eye.
"Ah be goin' to show 'ee, sir," he said, "how three ornary hacks, rightly drove, can take a dip an' a rise, even with a load like you gentlemen makes. Howd tight."
Then to Amaryllis he said, with paternal tenderness:
"Don't you be fallin' off now, my dear. And grab t' rail, not me, when they bump into their collars."
Simultaneously he lifted his foot from the break, uttered an exotic, mournful cry, and for the first time brought his long lash across his horses—Tod first, then the wheelers; and as the three shot down the remnant of the slope, he kept Tod's traces tight while the heavy load at their tails compelled the pair to run from it for their lives.
What he had foretold befell; the men in the body of the carriage broke into a boyish cheer of delight, which drowned for all his passengers but Amaryllis the words of that stream of polyglot invective, exhortation and endearment which the driver poured out over his cattle; a lost jeremiad, for Dick says he does not remember, and Amaryllis that, though she heard it all, there was much that she did not understand and a great deal more which nothing on earth will ever induce her to repeat.
As they rattled across the little stone bridge, Dick glanced to his left at the Hangman's Oak, the motor-cycle and the two men; saw foolish, innocent grins break through the suspicion on the two bad faces, and, jovially lifting his whip, waved them a salute.
In response, the two right hands came out of their pockets, forgetting for that moment what they left there.
The circling lash took each wheeler in turn, while the load still ran light behind them, and Tod, honest worker, answered relief with fresh effort.
By the time that the hill had reduced them to a straining walk, Gallowstree Dip was out of sight, and Dick let out his breath with a little hissing noise between the teeth. Amaryllis heard it and understood.
"Dad!" she said.
"Ay, lass?" he answered.
"Those two men," she said, lowering her voice and speaking in her natural manner: "as we were coming down to the bridge they pushed up their goggles, and their faces were beastly—just as if they meant," she whispered, "to kill somebody."
Dick nodded.
"And then the men behind began cheering, and those two horrid faces grew quite silly and good-natured. And when you waggled your whip at them they grinned and waved their hands, and one of them shouted something meant to be jolly."
"It just means, lovey," he answered, "that they made up their minds it was a beano after all, and that they'd got wind up about nothing. The mongrel sportsman and the bashful wench in a sun-bonnet were after all, they thought, a genuine substitute for Ned Blossom."
"Did you play for that?" she asked.
"Oh, well!" he answered vaguely; then added: "Don't worry, my lass. 'Tis all well for a while."
He kept his horses on a steady strain until the long rise was topped, and then climbed down from his seat and let them breathe, tightening this and feeling that about their tackle, until each horse was tricked into believing itself the object of especial interest; a belief of which Amaryllis saw the effect in three pairs of swivelling ears. At last, having lighted a cigarette dug from a yellow packet which he must have bought, she was sure, at "The Goat in Boots," he climbed back to her with this unusual ornament hanging stickily from his under lip.
The team started again willingly as he drew the reins softly in through his fingers; but for a while he kept them walking.
Then he turned to Mr. Dixon Mallaby.
"Parson," he said, "Ah've Ned Blossom's repitation to consider. Ah'll take 'em along easy-like, leastways if you're not in a hurry. Then you gives me the word when us be nobbut half mile from tha pull-up, an' I'll let 'em out champion."
"You don't know Ecclesthorpe, then?" said Dixon Mallaby.
"I dunno this ro'd," replied Dick. "If 'ee play match in Rectory field, Ah be to drive 'ee there, Ah reckon."
"They've got the Green in excellent shape again. The Ecclesthorpians," said the parson, "don't like the match outside."
All this and more Dick knew already; for he had ears as keen as his eyes, and words travel better to the coachman than from him.
"Then Ah'll drive 'ee to t' 'George,' sir," he said.
Twenty minutes later the St. Asaph's brake, wheelers at a swinging trot and the leader cantering in his best form, bowled through Ecclesthorpe-on-the-Moor, and drew up with a clatter and a scrape before "The Royal George."
The inn stood midway in one side of the village green, which was already surrounded with walking groups as well as stationary ranks awaiting patiently the opening of the game. For Ecclesthorpe had a name in its county, owning two families of hereditary professionals, as well as a lord of the manor, who, before the war, had kept wicket in three Test Matches, while the workman's club from Millsborough, captained this year by Dixon Mallaby, a 'Varsity Blue, had already a quarter of a century's repute of being hard to beat. So from far and wide those who had not gone to Timsdale-Horton races came always on the third Saturday in June to the "Ecclesthorpe Fixture."
As he brought his horses to a stand, Dick perceived that, while some notice was given to the oddity of his team, scarce a glance was bestowed on its unusual driver. The visiting eleven were the objects of interest to the straggling crowd in front of "The George."
When he had helped Amaryllis down from her perch, he lit a fresh gasper from the yellow packet, and methodically assisted the ostler to unhitch the horses; but just as the leader stepped free, a smart motor, coming from the south-west, hooted impatiently for space to reach the door of the inn.
The ostler, leaving Dick with his detached horses, hurried bandily to shift a farmer's gig, drawn up and abandoned in front of the porch.
Dick caught one glimpse of the car's driver, and took his wheelers by their bridles.
"Hey, lass!" he said. "Move tha legs a bit, now, an' lead Tod into staable."
By his tone she knew something evil was near, and obeyed with never a look round, but disappeared with Tod into the stable-yard, Dick following with his pair.
They found empty stalls, unbridled and haltered the horses without a word, and, just as Dick had found the few he must say to her, there was the ostler in the doorway.
"You be more helpin' like," he said, "'n owd Ned Blossom. I thank 'ee kind, I do—and you, miss."
"Ah'll thank 'ee, owd hoss, to pass no word agen Ned Blossom. My friend 'e be."
Then, to the vast surprise of Bandy-legs, Dick pushed a half-crown into his hand, and added, pleasantly as you please:
"Give nags feed an' rub down. And, when Ned comes rolling along to trot 'em home, tell 'im Sam Bunce won't forget Town Moor and Challacombe's Leger."
Crossing the stable-yard with Amaryllis, "Don't walk like that—bit more flat-footed, but don't clown it," said Dick. "And don't turn your face towards the door of the inn—mind. Know why I made you lead Tod?"
The girl's face seemed shrunken, and shone white in the bluish shade of her bonnet.
"There was a car," she stammered softly. "I didn't look. Was it——"
"Looked like Melchard driving," answered Dick. "I'd half a mind to take you out into the lane at the back. But it's safest amongst the crowd. And I must know whether——"
The crowd had grown dense before the open gates of the stable-yard, and Dick's words were interrupted by the sudden outbreak of a quarrel in the heart of it.
To a running chorus of jeers, expostulation, and fierce incentives to retaliation, there came in sight, pushing his way through the crush, a creature whose appearance immediately struck Dick and Amaryllis as ominous of danger.
The man, although of middle height and erect carriage, had so vast a spread and depth of chest, development of the deltoid muscles so unusual, and length of arm so unnatural as to establish the effect at once of power and deformity; to which the yellow skin, high cheek-bones, small eyes, and the thin black moustaches, drooping long and perpendicular from each corner of the broken-toothed mouth, added an expression of cruelty so unmitigated that Amaryllis turned sick at the sight, closing her eyes in dreadful disgust; while the European leather and cloth costume of a chauffeur not only added horror to the outlandish figure, but gave Dick Bellamy almost the certainty that here was yet another accomplice of Alban Melchard.
As the monster drew near, making his way savagely towards the stables, there thrust himself in the way Bob Woodfall, the good-natured champion of the village—six feet two inches and fourteen stone of bone and muscle, good cricket and five years' war record, dressed in country-made flannels, ready for his place in the Ecclesthorpe team.
"Hey, man!" he cried good-naturedly. "Be no manner o' sense bargin' thro' decent throng like a blasty tank into half battalion o' lousy Jerrys."
Then, quite close, the Malay turned his face full on Amaryllis, and Dick saw that its right ear had a large gold ring hanging from a hole in the lobe—a hole that was stretched by the mere weight of the metal to three times the size of its thickness.
But on the left side of the head was no ring to match, for the reason that no ear was there to support it. In some unclean strife in Hong-Kong or Zanzibar it had been torn away, leaving, to mark its place, only the orifice in the head, staring in ghastly isolation most horrible of all.
Amaryllis saw the face again, this time in its full lopsided monstrosity, and turned to Dick, clutching him and hiding her eyes against his shoulder.
Hearing her gasp, a woman in the crowd cried out:
"Howd t' heathen! He flays t' lasses, and he'll curd t' milk."
"Gi' 'im a flap on jaw, Bob Woodfall," cried a youth. "One's all 'e'll take."
It was. Bob, perhaps, was too kindly to put his full weight into the blow, and got no chance for a second.
With a savage cry, between a grunt and a squeal, the Malay ran in, clutching with his great horny sailor's hands. Too quickly for any eye but Dick's to see how it was done, he had Bob Woodfall by the nape of the neck and the band of his trousers and lifted the long body high above the crowd at full-length of his terrible arms, brandishing it helpless, like some Mongolian Hercules a Norse Antaeus; took three steps to the stone wall of the stable-yard, and would have flung the village hero over it to break upon the cobble-stones, but for a gloved hand laid upon his shoulder, and a soft, high-pitched voice, saying: "Taroh, plan plan, Mut-mut!"
And the monster obeyed the voice and touch of his master, restoring Woodfall to his feet with a docility that made him, if possible, more hateful to the crowd than before.
"Akau baleh," continued Melchard. "Dan nante sana."
And Mut-mut, the crowd yielding passage, made his way to the car, and sat at the wheel.
Arrived at the gates of the stable-yard almost simultaneously with Melchard, was Dixon Mallaby; and Dick observed not only that there was acquaintance between them, but also that, while the parson endured recognition, Melchard sought it.
"I'm ashamed of that fellow of mine," he said. "Yet I cannot help being attached to the ruffian. He would die to serve me; but the ribaldry of an English crowd is too much for his temperament."
"If you don't want him to die without serving you, Mr. Melchard," replied the parson, "I should advise you to keep him in better control."
"Ah, well! I owe him so much already, you see. The strange fellow saved my life in the Persian Gulf. Serang—boat's swain, you know, to the Lascar crew. Sharks in the water—horrible!"
The parson thought that even in this the serang had done the world poor service.
Having delicately wiped his face with a ladylike handkerchief in memory of his danger and gratitude, Melchard tried again.
"I saw you arrive with your quaint team, sir," he said; "the unicorn, I mean, not the eleven."
But the parson allowed no outsider to poke fun at the St. Asaph's cricket club.
"Handled his horses in fine style, your driver. Why!" exclaimed Melchard, as if noticing Dick and Amaryllis with her head on his shoulder for the first time, "there he is—and pleasantly occupied. I mean the fellow with the girl in his arms, and the cut on his face. I wonder how he got it."
Amaryllis heard the voice and the words, and, to keep her breath from gasping and her body from trembling, she caught and ground between her teeth a wrinkle of Dick's coat.
Melchard, she felt, had taken a step towards her.
"I don't know how he got it," the clergyman was saying. "But something painful, I understand, happened to the other man. The girl is his daughter, recovering from an illness."
Melchard took another step towards the couple.
"Better let well alone, Mr. Melchard," said Dixon Mallaby sternly. "Your servant has already made trouble enough."
Throughout these few strained moments Dick had borne himself as a man concerned only with his daughter. But at this moment Dixon Mallaby caught a gleam from his eyes which assured him that the least familiarity or impertinence of Melchard's would be resented in a manner likely to divert the crowd's lingering anger from Mut-mut to his master. Much as he disliked Melchard and his indefinitely unpleasant reputation, he was not going to have his match spoiled by the beating and kicking to a jelly of a scented and dandified Millsborough dentist.
So, ignoring Melchard, he went up to Sam Bunce.
"I am afraid your daughter is hardly as strong as you thought, Mr. Bunce," he said.
Melchard, with a finicking air of nonchalance, stood where he was left, lighting a cigarette.
"'Tis nowt but she's frit with that flay-boggart of a Chinaman," said Dick, "wi'out it be she trembles lest 'er daddy gets fightin' agen. There, then, little lass," he said, stooping to her ear, and coaxing back courage, thought the parson, with a voice extraordinarily tender. "Way out o' t' crowd her vitals'll settle back to rights and she'll foot it another six mile singing."
"Then you won't see our match, Mr. Bunce?"
"'T' lass knows nowt o' cricket," replied Dick. "'Mornin' seemed like she relished going to t' fun and press o't. But now she's feared o' seein' that blasted ogre again. So, thankin' you, sir, for your lift and your good heart to us, we'll just foot it along o'er t' moor."
Dixon Mallaby shook hands with him; the girl, as she drew away from Sam Bunce's arm, bobbed the parson a curtsey. But she never turned her face to him, and Mallaby, thoughtfully watching the pair down the road to the south-west, observed that she never once looked back; for even when, being almost indistinguishable among the moving crowd at the corner of the green, they were hailed by the ostler, toddling quickly from the yard, waving a handkerchief and crying: "Hey, Mr. Bunce, Mr. Sam'l Bunce!" it was only the man who turned his head, waving his hand as if in reply to a belated farewell.
The parson swung round in time to see Melchard snatch the handkerchief from the ostler's hand.
Feeling the clergyman's eyes upon him, he muttered: "Looks like one of mine," and ran the hem quickly through his fingers, prying into the corners.
At the third, he found a mark, and dropped the handkerchief on the stones.
"Of course not," he said, and laughed. "Stupid of me, when I hadn't been in the stables."
Dixon Mallaby picked it up.
"Tis t'yoong wumman's," objected Bandy-legs. "Dropped un inside, stablin' t' 'osses."
But the parson put the handkerchief in his pocket.
"I am acquainted with Miss Bunce," he said. "Perhaps I shall see them again."
With a feeling which he found unreasonable, that he had protected a good woman from a bad man, Mr. Dixon Mallaby went to the dressing-room in "The Royal George."
Out of Melchard's sight, he examined the handkerchief—a lady's, marked with the embroidered initials A.C., and it struck him, once more with a sense of unreason, not only that the beastly dentist had discovered that these letters did not stand for Araminta Bunce, but that he knew the names which they were here intended to represent.
"What is it?" asked Amaryllis, as Dick turned to a shout, waving his hand.
"I don't want to know what he wants, so I take his antics for good byes. Come on—let's get into the thick of this lot."
"Was he suspicious?" she asked, when a bend in the road had hidden "The Royal George" and even the village green.
"Melchard? Yes—on general principles. No more than that—unless——"
"There's that cut on your cheek, Dick," said Amaryllis.
"And there's the colour of your hair, la-ass," he answered, laughing.
"He never saw under the bonnet," and she whisked the pig-tail forward over her shoulder. "Look at that," she said.
"How did you make it that common brown?" he asked, astonished.
"Mother Brundage," said Amaryllis, "greased her hands from the frying-pan and rubbed it down hand over hand as if she were hoisting a sail. The Marquis of Ontario," she said, "wouldknowI wasn't his daughter, with that-coloured hair."
"Then why did you go all to pieces," asked Dick, "at the sound of Melchard's voice?"
"It was that frightful man made me feel queer. Just as I was getting better, I heard Melchard, and I thought the best place for my aristocratic nose was on my daddy's shoulder. Dick!" she cried, looking up at his solemn face, "I really couldn't help feeling bad."
"Most girls 'd've fainted. You're clever as paint," he said, "you turn your two-spots into aces, and leave him in baulk every time. Poor, shaking kid! And I'd brandy in my pocket, and couldn't give it to you!" He pulled out his flask. "Have some—you'd better."
Amaryllis with a little tender wrinkle somewhere in her beauty, laughed in his face.
"Do I look," she asked, "as if I needed Dutch courage?"
Colour of skin and splendour of eye answered their own question.
"Youlooktop-hole," he said. "But you've had a heavy call on your strength."
"What about you, then?" and she touched her left cheek, meaning his. "One like that," she said, "and I should have been in bed for a month—or dead."
"Pépe said I was to keep on feeding you," he continued, passing over, as he always did, she observed, her reference to himself, "and there's been no chance but that beer and cheese. I meant to stuff you again at 'The George.'"
On their left, in the very outskirts of Ecclesthorpe, was a little stone house, roofed with stone slabs, and surrounded with gardens, bee-hives and flowers. Upon a wooden arch connecting its stone gate-posts was written "Cyclists' Rest. Tea, Minerals."
"Um!" said Dick. "'Minerals' always makes me think of museums, but it only means ginger-pop and wuss. Tea's the thing, if brandy isn't."
He pushed the gate open; the hinges screamed, and a young woman came to the door of the cottage. As they went towards her through hives and wallflowers,
"How the bees do bumble!" said Amaryllis.
"Pot o' fresh tea, miss," said Bunce to the round-faced, soft-eyed girl at the door. "And pikelets and parkin an' anything you've got to hand. We've nobbut ten minutes now forth to eat an' drink."
He put two half-crowns on the table.
"An' Ah'll never take change, my dear," he added, "so be 'tis ready in three."
In two and a half they were drinking it, Bunce-like, from the saucers; and Amaryllis once more in danger of the giggles.
"Ma lass and self, miss," said Bunce, between gulps, "be footin' it to Harthborough Junction. Bain't there a train, five summat wi' another five in it?"
"Five fifteen," said the girl. "Lunnon way."
"That'll be it. We're takin' 't easy-like o'er moor. Now, Ah do call to mind there be a track to left, some way down t' ro'd, as'll take 'ee gentle and pleasant 'tween two gradely hummocks down into Harthborough. But how far out o' Ecclesthorpe that track takes off the pike, I can't bring to mind. 'Tis not a ro'd proper but indistink like an' wanderin'. So Ah be feared o' missin' it."
"T' owd Drovers' Track, tha meanst. 'Tis easy findin'," said the girl. "Thou turn'st off to left by two thorns wi' a white stone by root o' t' girt 'un. But they stand a long mile down t' road. Now, if 'ee likes to go through house an' cross t' paddock, Ah'll put 'ee in sheep path that'll take thee to Drovers' Track where un runs up 'tween t' rocks—Bull's Neck, they call it."
When they had finished their tea, and Dick, from the sweetstuff counter, had crammed into already burdened pockets two half-pound packets of chocolate, the girl led them to the further gate of her father's paddock, whence she indicated the highest point of the ridge over which "T' owd Drovers' Track" threaded its way.
"Howd eyes on t' lofty knob of 'un," she said, "and thou'lt not stray."
For two or three hundred yards the pair walked in silence; and now that terror had passed with the imminence of danger, and that no strange eyes surrounded her for which she must play a part not learned nor rehearsed, the terrible pressure which had brought Amaryllis so close to her companion was relaxed—not annihilated, but withdrawn to lurk in sky and air, instead of squeezing the very life and breath out of her physical body.
Dick, therefore, though not two feet from her side, seemed all at once a hundred miles away. The man whose arm had held her, and whose coat she had rubbed her face against, she now found herself too shy to touch or speak to. Yet she wished to hear his voice, and even more, longed to feel that he was really there—the same man, no other than she had found him.
She fixed her eyes upon him, hoping he would feel them and respond—help her somehow to bridge this silly gulf. But he strode on, at a pace which made her run lest she should fall behind.
His eyes were set straight forward, his head a little bent. No smoke came from the pipe in his mouth, and the whole expression of face and figure was of dogged endurance. A little trickle of blood had started afresh from the wound on his cheek. She wondered what had set it flowing again. Could it have been some clumsiness of her own in her convulsive clinging to him?
A woman's compassion, more easily aroused by a cut finger than by a suffering mind, narrowed the chasm between them, until a small, soft voice bridged it.
"Dick!" she cried. "Oh, Dick."
But the stiff face remained rigid, so the frightened girl quickened her pace until she was well in front; then, turning, she saw that their lids covered two-thirds of the eye-balls, and that the mechanism of the man was driven by an impulse of which, if it were his at all, he was surely not conscious.
As he reached her side, she laid a hand on him, and, "Dick!" she cried again.
The man started, turning his face the wrong way.
The eyes did not open, but the jaw muscles relaxed, letting the cold pipe fall from his teeth. The blind effort which he made to catch it overbalanced the automaton.
He pitched forward, and would have fallen on his face, but for the shoulder which stopped his head, and the arms that clutched his reeling body.
Accurate instinct loosened her joints as the weight struck her, and she came slowly to her knees, sinking back until she sat upon her heels, so that the man received no shock. She had turned halfside-ways as she went down; and kneeling, held him across her, with the uninjured cheek strained upon her left shoulder, and his heels far away to her right.
She looked down into the face, where the eyes were now wholly covered.
The dark semi-circles under the closed lids and the deepened lines of the thin face moved in her compassion as tender as she felt for the bleeding bruise on the cheek. She remembered how he had nursed her, and given her, by his mere sympathy and control, that hour's wonderful sleep. She remembered him crawling, at the acme of her terror, through the slit of the window; saving her from the Dutch woman; turning his back while she dressed; leaping like a heaven-sent devil over the stair-rail; fighting Ockley with his fists—and refused to remember that same enemy brought utterly to an end of his enmity.
Her heart swelled, and beat heavily with the sense of ownership and the dread of losing what was her own; it was a fear more poignant than any other of the fears which she had suffered in a long chain since she fell asleep in Randal Bellamy's study—only last night!
Was it death—death which she had seen once already to-day—was it that coming to her here against her heart? Or was it but with him as it had been with her in the Brundage bedroom—the awful need of sleep.
She bent her ear close over his lips, and heard the breath long, and regular.
She forgot his wasted features in the beauty of the long eyelashes touching his cheeks; and just because she could not see what the lids were hiding, she remembered her walk down through the wood below the Manor House, and that foolish phrase, "blue as a hummin-bird's weskit," which had then haunted her, till she found him playing with Gorgon in the road; and from that to her bewilderment twenty-four hours later, when he had called the dog Zola. She had reproved the enormity of the syncopated pun, but Dick had insisted that Zola fitted an animal whose expression was always either disgusted or disgusting.
She must not keep him here, so near the stone cottage, and the road. They might be seen.
He had offered her brandy. Carefully she felt his coat. The right outside pocket she could not reach, but there was a hard lump in it, pressing against her cramped knees.
She leaned over sideways, twisted her legs in front of her, and made a lap into which, by edging away from the heavy body, she let the head slide gently. She got the flask out, pulled the metal cup from its base, and into it poured a little brandy. With tender force she managed at last to send a trickle of the spirit into his mouth.
He choked, tried to swallow, coughed violently, and then opened his eyes.
"I told you," he said, "that you needed brandy, not to kill me with it. What's happened?"
"You were walking in your sleep," she began.
"Sleeping in my walk, perhaps," he admitted. "Bad enough, but very different."
His senses coming back to him, Dick felt a wet drop on his forehead, brushed it away, and glanced at the sky, but not, as Amaryllis expected, at her.
"Well," she said, "I was frightened."
"Why?"
"You dropped your pipe, tried to catch it, and fell on your face," explained Amaryllis.
Dick felt his nose and eyebrows. "No, I never!" he declared indignantly.
Amaryllis laughed shakily.
"You see, I'm softer than the ground. You fell on me." And she patted her left shoulder.
"Your fault, I'm afraid. Must have tipped you right over."
"No, I just subsided—quite neatly. And you never got a bump, Dick. But I was afraid—afraid, you know."
"I must be in rotten condition, going to pieces like that. Why, look at you—been through twice as much."
"Oh, no," she answered, snatching greedily at the opportunity of telling a little of what she had been thinking. "Did I drive two hundred and fifty miles in the dark, at fifty miles an hour? Did I climb and crawl, and fight, and nurse a squealing girl after carrying her for miles?"
"Three hundred yards," said Dick dryly. "And you must have been shamming to know anything about it."
"Mrs. Brundage told me," she answered, "that you came through the wood carrying me in your arms."
And so was he in hers—the reversal of their cases struck him like a soft, heavy blow on the heart.
And so much puzzled was Amaryllis by the strange intensity of his eyes lifted to hers that she found the gaze hard to endure, and moved uneasily.
"We ought not to stay here, Dick," she said.
He started scrambling to his feet, but Amaryllis was before him, and giving him a hand, helped him to rise with a pull of which the vigour surprised him.
"You're strong," he said, swaying unsteadily for a moment.
She flushed with pleasure at male praise.
"I'm awfully strong. I've felt perfectly safe, you see, ever since—since I was such a fool and you made me sleep and be sensible."
Dick looked about him, and caught sight of the stone roof of the cottage where the bees bumbled.
"I didn't get far before I crumpled," he said. "Let's get a move on."
As they walked with their eyes on the cleft knob of the ridge, he reverted to her last words.
"Not scared any more? Then what price Melchard?" he asked, "and malingering pig-tailed wenches that hide their faces and sob on their daddies' shoulders?"
"It was that frightful Chinaman, Dick. Yes, I was afraid then. I was afraid—afraid you'd——"
"Take him on? Nothin' doing," he answered. "I should've stood just a dog's chance against the village hero, my dear girl, and the Malay made just one bite of him. Next time that lopsided serang looms on the horizon, you won't see me for dust and small stones."
The tone, perhaps, more than the words in which the man of whom she could not help making a hero seemed to disparage himself, annoyed Miss Caldegard.
It was as if one good friend of hers had maligned another, and she could not quarrel with the traducer without falling out with the traduced.
"But it was Melchard's voice that made you take a lump of me between your teeth and bite a hole in my coat," he went on. "There's a hideous wound just under this." And he picked at two broken threads on his shoulder.
"That was just hate and disgust, not fear. And it's horrid to say I bit you, when you know I didn't. But I was afraid, Dick, that you'd have to do something to that huge dwarf-thing, and get hurt—and——"
"Well, I've told you I'll bolt if he shows his face," he repeated, more gently. But seeing her flush and frown angrily, "What's wrong, Amaryllis?" he asked, and drew nearer to her side as they walked.
But she kept the distance undiminished.
"I don't like the way you speak of yourself," she replied hotly. "It makes me feel angry—as if someone else had done it."
"Done what?"
"Lied about you—said you were afraid of a hideous freak out of a circus. You!"
The brown eyes blazed on him with the anger meant for his hypothetic slanderer. And Dick, between the joy with which her annexation of his honour filled him, and his weakened control, found himself on the edge of an explosion of feeling; but brought back common-sense and good-humour to them both with a touch of his antiseptic cynicism.
"Can you swim?" he asked.
"Yes," said the girl, round-eyed.
"If you couldn't, would you jump in after another fool that couldn't?"
"Another? Oh!" exclaimed the girl.
"Well, you would be, if you couldn't. But you can. Now, would you jump in?"
"No. I should run for a rope or something."
"That's me," said Dick. "Next time that crop-eared, chrome-coloured coolie shows against the sky-line, I run for a rope or something."
The wrinkles disappeared from her forehead, and once more Amaryllis slipped her hand through the bend of his arm. She did it as for friendship or support, but her thought was for him. His rest had been nothing, and at any moment that deadly sleep might seize him again. She made up her mind that next time, even should they have to finish their walking by night, his sleep should be at least as long as that he had given her.
"I'm a pig to be cross," she said. "But I'm only not cross now because you make me laugh with your ridiculous good temper. But, Dick——"
She had felt that, without her linked arm, his steps would already be wandering.
"Well?" he said.
"Next time it's too much for you, I'm going to let you sleep. You must."
He looked at his watch.
"It's a quarter to three," he said. "If we missed that train at five-fifteen, we should have to wait till ten for the next."
"And it'd be much safer," Amaryllis broke in, "to wait on the moor, than in a village or a station where people could see us."
"Yes. I'm not clear-headed enough now to see into Melchard's mind, but I can still calculate on what I know. If he didn't suspect us, he'll go the round of his pickets, beginning with Gallowstree Dip. If he did suspect, he'll come this way after us, and run down towards the London road and look across the moor, along the Drovers' Track from the hawthorns and the white stone. He won't see us—we are in a fold till we get a mile further at least. He'll go on towards the main road, but when he meets his picket that nobody like us two has passed, he'll come back and try the Drovers' Track."
"He didn't suspect," insisted the girl.
"We'll bank on that, then," said Dick, "—if we can find a bush or a ditch to hide in."
The faint path they were following here reached the lowest point of the depression which hid them from the road and from the cottage by whose back door they had left it, and soon began to rise.
The ascent, as they topped it, proved, however, to be concerned merely with crossing a spur, below which the path wound about the edge of a bowl-shaped hollow, rimmed and lined with dark-green, close-cropped grass; and at the bottom lay a tiny tarn.
So steep were the sides that a broad band of green was reflected to the eyes bent down upon the still water. And this circle of mirrored green, embracing a disc of the sky's azure, stared up at them like a pupil-less blue eye.
"Oh!" exclaimed Amaryllis, "it's a sapphire set in emerald!"
Down a winding path, vague as a wrinkle on a young face, and worn, said Amaryllis, by ghostly hoofs of departed sheep, they crept to the pool's edge.
They sat on a little irregular terrace, a few feet above the water, and Dick, taking the cup from his flask, and having dipped, tasted, rinsed and filled again, passed it to Amaryllis.
"Good water," he said, watching her drink. Amaryllis smiled on him as she finished, and plunged into the ample pocket of Mrs. Brundage's skirt for her chocolate. She broke off a lump and gave him the cup to fill once more.
"It's lovely water," she said, munching; then poured out half the water he had given her. "But I'm going to spoil yours," she went on, and poured in brandy till the cup almost brimmed. "Just obey meekly for once."
"That's easy," said Dick.
"For brandy, or for me?" asked the girl.
But Dick was drinking.
"Now lie down along the ledge. Be quick. I can't enjoy my chocolate till you do."
He looked at her with heavy eyes.
"I must," he said. "The brandy's finished me."
Without rising, he drew up his legs to the terrace level, stretched them out, said: "Wake me, if the chocolate makes you sleepy," and rolled full length on his left side.
"Lift your head a little, and I'll spread a bit of my skirt under it. There's plenty of it," said Amaryllis, shifting towards him as she sat.
She got no answer. He was dead asleep.
Five minutes she gave him to sink deeper into the unknown, while she hovered above his dreams like a seagull over the course of a stream which has disappeared into a tunnel.
At last she lifted his head and drew a fold of her skirt beneath it; but was not yet content; for she knew the weariness of lying on the side when the unsupported neck and heavy head increase the pressure on the under shoulder. So once more, to slip her knee beneath the neck for a pillow, she raised the head—and there came to her heart and breath a flutter which seemed to make its attack through fingers and up the arms. She felt, with a difference, the strong, subtle, ineffable thrill of a woman's early handlings of her earliest child.
In spite of her terror in the night, her danger of the early morning, the men fighting and the man dead; in spite of the excitement and risks of the afternoon, shaking the heart in relief only less than in encounter, and in spite of aching head and limbs, stiffening to cramp while she still sat and the man still slept, Amaryllis knew herself happier than ever in her life before.
Not rejoicing in the future—neither in hope nor in fear of what the sleeper might feel, what ask for, when danger was behind him and fighting once more a splendid thing belonging to newspapers and books; instinctively aware, perhaps, that his spirit had moved already half-way to meet hers, yet so far from asking, even of her own mind, whether Dick Bellamy loved her or no, that she did not even mentally formulate the idea of love to explain her own feelings, Amaryllis sat in blissful, unphilosophic enjoyment of service and protection.
Was she not at once his pillow and his defence? Was he not sleeping like a little child whose fever has abated? And had she not a dog's ears and a sailor's eyes for his enemies? And did she not know just where to lay her hand on the butt of Ockley's pistol, how precious were its two cartridge's, and how near, therefore, to use each with effect, she must let an enemy approach?
She was happy, then, and time was nothing, until the man's head moved on her numbed thigh, and a deep sigh came from his chest.
She leaned over him and lifted the lock of straight black hair which had fallen over the left eye, stroking it back as he would have brushed it, and murmuring, "Lie still, dear, lie still," in just such words and tones as some day she would use to a smaller man on a softer pillow.
But the instinct of the man of many wilds had told him that his hour's rest was over.
He sighed again, turned on his back, and opened his eyes.
He saw her face hanging over him—upside down, it seemed. Yet even inverted, and seen through the mists of sleep, that face conveyed something which he did not understand, something so strange that he caught his breath, gasping, and blundered to his feet.
The girl still sat, looking up at him.
"What is it?" he asked, sharply.
But Amaryllis had forgotten herself altogether, and did not know that he found his wonder in her face.
"What is what?" she asked, simply.
"Your face——" he began, and could find no more words.
"My face," she echoed, puzzled, and feeling blindly for a handkerchief. "It's all right, isn't it?"
"It's glorious—shining with happiness," he answered, his voice sounding like that of a man in pain.
"Weren't you glad," asked Amaryllis, "when you'd got me off to sleep, and when I woke up all alive again? I know it didn't make you look anything but stern and pre-occupied and business-like; I felt as if you were pleased, though. I'm different, and show things in my face, I suppose."
"But you were looking like that when I opened my eyes."
"Well?" said Amaryllis.
"You hadn't had time to know whether I was well or ill, strong or weak. And you looked as if it had been there a long time."
"What?" she asked again.
"The—the expression," said Dick, his tone as fierce as his words were lame.
Very sweetly, and with no taint of derision in the sweetness, Amaryllis laughed.
"The gloriousness? I'd been watching you all the time, you see, and I knew it was doing you lots of good—and—and I was proud of being useful, perhaps. So, of course I looked happy and shining."
"When did you take my head on your knees?" he asked, sternly.
But this time she understood every furrow of his frown.
"As soon as you were asleep," she answered.
He looked at his watch. It was four o'clock.
"And I never moved?" he asked.
"No."
"Nor you?"
"No, Dick."
"An hour and a quarter! My God!" he exclaimed, "you must be as stiff as a pious book. And I'm damned if you're not sitting there because you can't get up!"
"Oh, yes, I could. But give me a hand," she answered; and he pulled her to her feet.
She staggered, and he caught her by an elbow.
"One of them's as fast asleep as you were," she said. "It'll go off in a minute."
But for Dick Bellamy, caught at last on the ebb of his resistance, one elbow was not enough. So he seized the other, and by the pair held her off from him, looking into her eyes.
"Tell me what it meant," he said, "—your face."
"I've told you," she replied, with serious eyes.
"I saw it. It must have meant a great deal more than your words, or a great deal less than it looked. If you were taking a cheap pleasure in being charitable, your face is a liar, Amaryllis. If you find great happiness in being loved,youare."
She ignored the accusation, merely answering:
"I might."
But she was still so serious that Dick could not speak.
"It wasn't exactly that, though," she explained. "I want to be as truthful as my face—if you could read it right."
"Tell me, then."
"It was my half, I think, that made me so awfully contented."
"Your half? That means—if you mean anything at all—you mean, your half was loving me?"
She nodded, and spoke before he could answer the nod.
"Of course I might not have stayed contented long, if you hadn't been like that too. You are, aren't you?"
His hands had slipped up her arms to her shoulders, and it sent a pang of wild joy through her content to feel them trembling while they held her.
"Contented? No, by God, I'm not!Contented'sas much as saying I could have enough of you. But I've loved you ever since I heard you calling Zola in that wonderful voice of yours. Before I even saw your face close, your 'Gorgon! Gorgon!' gave me a pain I was afraid of, because I wanted to be hurt again. It made me angry. You've been waking me up at four in the morning and never letting me sleep again. You've filled my head with pictures—a whole cinema of pictures; and my ears with sounds! Your dress on the stairs; your voice calling 'Dad! dad!' from the garden, and humming little tunes I'd never heard till you sang 'em, coming in with your arms full of leaves and flowers. Seems like months you've filled me, and it's only four days. No, I'm not contented, Amaryllis, but I'm damned happy."
Then his arms crossed each other round her body; and it seemed to Amaryllis that she sank away into space filled with an ecstasy; and that, after a while, which was not time, she was fetched back into time and to earth by hands so strong that they had brought the ecstasy with them also.
There were kisses, not all his.
Then, to focus her joy, she thrust it away from her; and, seeing Dick Bellamy's countenance, she remembered how he had spoken of what he had found, when he awoke, in hers.
His eyes shone upon her as she now knew she had always wished them to shine. Splendid eyes, she had called them in that part of herself where she had for a long time—quite two days—made pretence of deafness; eyes very blue and firm, but seldom, until now, to be long held.
"Dick," she said, "that's the first time—just what I wanted."
"What?" he asked.
"Your voice has spoken to me, your ears have heard me, your eyes have looked at me. But now, your eyes are listening to mine. Oh, Dick!" she exclaimed.
"Yes," he answered gravely, "it's great to be free."
"Tremendous!" said Amaryllis.
Her hands were looking for her handkerchief in the Brundage pocket. They encountered a comb, the half-packet of chocolate, a pair of white cotton gloves which raised a moment's hope, and Dick's pipe, which she had picked up as they started again on their way; but no handkerchief! And her cheeks were wet with half-dried tears, and Dick was coming nearer.
"Oh, please," she cried, "do lend me a hanky. You made me a bodice of one—in that beastly room with the woman—and you took it from a bundle of them, out of your coat pocket. I felt them there when I wore it. I left the one you gave me behind, and I've lost my own."
The pathetical-comical expression of a pretty woman in danger of using elementary means to dry her tears, made Dick Bellamy chuckle with laughter of a quality that Amaryllis had not heard from him before, while he chose the least rumpled handkerchief from his stock of four, and shook it open for her.
She took it, blessing him as women will bless a man for such relief; and, as she used it, there struck him, like a smack in his face, the memory of her hand and another handkerchief.
"I saw you use your own," he said, "on the box of that Noah's Ark of a wagonette. I remember your pretty fingers and action. I hoped nobody behind us would see that it was a lady blowing her nose. It was a little handkerchief—your own," he insisted. "When did you lose it?"
Amaryllis perceived that the question bore upon their safety, and puckered her forehead, thinking.
"I wiped my fingers with it, after I'd taken Tod Sloan's bridle off," she answered, "There was a sticky mess of hay and chaff on them from the bit, and I remember wiping it off with my handkerchief."
"Seen it since?" he asked.
"No," said the girl. "Does it matter? Even if I did drop it then, Melchard wouldn't go in there. He hadn't any horses."
"The ostler called after us, you remember. He was waving something white."
"Oh! You didn't tell me. And you'd given him half a crown!" said Amaryllis.
"Seemed a grateful sort of bloke, didn't he?" said Dick, ruefully.
"And wanted to give it back to me? Oh, Dick! Melchard was there, close by, talking to the handsome clergyman."
"Was it marked."
"An embroidery-stitched A.C. That's all," said Amaryllis.
"C doesn't stand for Bunce. Let's get out of this," said Dick Bellamy.
As they reached the level of the moor and the Drovers' Track, to join which ancient road their path stretched on for yet a mile, they turned, moved by a common impulse, to look down on the green hollow which had been the nest of so great a happiness.
"Emerald, you said, Amaryllis?"
"And blue, Dick, from the sky."
When they had tramped a half-mile or more in silence which seemed to Amaryllis very close communion, Dick spoke; for already he was feeling the stones of the world beneath their feet.
"We put our money on the wrong horse, dear. They didn't suspect—they knew. And they're near us," he said.
"I don't care. If they kill me now, Dick, I don't care."
He agreed—nodding more sympathetically, she thought, than any man before him had ever nodded.
But after another silence, he said:
"And yet that makes it all the more necessary to come out top dog this time. Where d'you think they are?"
"If the Drovers' Track's good enough for a car," she answered, "I should guess—after all, it's all guessing, isn't it?—I should guess that they turned off the road at the hawthorns and the white stone, and drove straight on to Harthborough."
"They've had time to go and come back," said Dick. "If we had food with us, we might hide all night on the moor. But you'd be ill by the morning."
"Let's go on," said Amaryllis.
"You lead me to luck," he answered, "so what you say goes. A train's the safest place for us, and, if Melchard's seen his picket there after driving right over this ground, he won't be expecting to find us on the way back."
"He may be between us and Harthborough now," said Amaryllis.
"If we can pass him, then," said Dick, "his Harthborough picket won't give us much trouble. Our other way is the London road. There we might run into Melchard plus his picket. The railway's at Harthborough, so Harthborough's got it."
"And here," said the girl, "is the Drovers' Track."
Before they knew it, they had stepped into a way wider and more clearly marked than the path which had brought them across the base of the triangle of which the apex was the white stone by the hawthorns they had never seen.
"It's a derelict Roman road," said Dick, as they walked along it towards the cleft in the ridge. "See the small paving stones—here—there—and you can feel 'em through the turf, here at the side. Most of this grass has come since the railways took the cattle and the goods wagons off the road. If the track is as good as this all the way——"
"What's that?" exclaimed Amaryllis, stopping and listening.
They were not more than three hundred yards from the point where the road began to rise from the broad, level space of the moor spreading on both sides of the old paved causeway in firm, close-nibbled grass, interspersed with tufts of ling and heather, varied by rarer clumps of gorse.
Not within a hundred yards in any direction could Dick find possible cover from eyes descending the Bull's Neck.
The pair stood motionless, their hearts in their ears.
What they heard was unmistakable.
"A motor," said Amaryllis. "It's coming down."
She laid a hand on his shoulder, lifting her face to him.
When he raised his own from it, it was to watch the point where the descending road took its last bend in the passage by which it had traversed the ridge: the point where the approaching car must appear.
With flushed face and unflinching eyes, Amaryllis stood beside her lover, her right hand still lying light on his shoulder, her sun-bonnet fallen back, and the beauty of hair and features open to the coming enemy.
As the blue car pushed its nose round the corner, and, turning, made straight for the lower plateau, she glanced at Dick's face once more; to see there an impersonal serenity which she might have found inhuman, had she been a mere spectator of the drama which was coming. Being, however, one of its persons, she felt herself enwrapped, and uplifted from fear by the consciousness that a calm mind and a swift brain were supporting each other in her service.
In her soul she cried already, notNous les aurons, butIl les a.
"They'll see us," said Dick. "When I say 'run!' make for that gorse-bush. I'll be behind, overdoing my limp. When I say 'down!' fall—sprained ankle. I try to pull you up. You grip your ankle and yell. They'll be out of the car and after us. When they're close, I shall bolt across the road. Yell out 'don't leave me.' They won't touch you—they're after me—I've got the stuff. When they're well away, get back to the car. Get in. Can you drive her?"
"Yes, it's a Seely-Thompson."
"Get her round, head to the rise, ready to pick me up. Got it?"
"Yes," said Amaryllis.
From the car came a queer animal cry. The machine shot suddenly forward.
Deceived by the immobility of the waiting pair, the driver had increased his pace.
"Run!" said Dick, and Amaryllis leapt the ditch at the roadside and ran in the direction he had given. He followed clumsily, exaggerating his lameness.
The car shot by them, as they ran obliquely in the opposite direction, so adding, before the driver could pull up, a hundred yards to their start.
It was, therefore, not until Amaryllis was at the rise of the ridge that they heard behind them the two pairs of feet in pursuit.
"Down!" said Dick, close behind her; and with a well simulated shriek of pain, the girl fell in a heap.
"Oh, my foot!" she cried.
Dick's chief fear was that shooting should begin too soon.
But he heard Melchard's high voice shouting angrily to Mut-mut in his own tongue.
"Jagun pakai snapong. Brenkali akau mow pukul sama prempuan."
And Dick smiled, turning his head in time to see Mut-mut tuck away his revolver.
He leaned over Amaryllis, with pretence of trying to pull her to her feet.
"All right. It works. He's telling Crop-ear not to shoot, 'fear of hitting you."
Amaryllis pushed his hands away, clutched her ankle and moaned aloud.
Dick turned from her and, at a better pace than before, hobbled across the road, pursued by entreaties from Amaryllis so agonized and lifelike as almost to deceive the very author of the scheme.
As he began, with increased appearance of lameness to labour up the slope, he once more heard Melchard's voice:
"Jagun pakai snapong, kalau dea ta mow lepas. Kita mow dapat."
Labouring still more, Dick glanced behind him and saw the two pursuers straining every nerve to overtake him, and for the moment giving no thought to Amaryllis.
Something more Melchard said, but this time Dick could not catch the order. Mut-mut, however, interpreted, by altering his course and running along the foot of the ridge towards a place where the ascent appeared less steep. By this, it seemed, he intended to cut across Dick's line of flight, and to drive him back upon Melchard.
Melchard, meantime, was toiling up the slope in Dick's footsteps with a determination unexpected in a man of his appearance and mode of life.
On the other side of the ancient causeway, at the very foot of the slope, Amaryllis, full of courage and calculation, but with a heart beating painfully until her moment for action should come.
This, she had resolved, must be the moment when she should lose sight of the last runner; and by turning her head sideways, though never raising it, she could see that Dick had the same idea; for he had so directed his flight that he and Melchard were soon hidden from her, while the lumbering Mut-mut, wasting huge force, it seemed, upon each short stride, pounding along the lower ground, vanished only when, reaching his chosen line of ascent, he began to mount the hill.
Then Amaryllis rose, lifted the voluminous skirt, tucked the hem into the waistband, and ran, with long flashes of grey stocking, for the abandoned car.
Dick, still leading his enemies on, saw her in one of his calculating looks behind him. And his heart leapt into his throat for pride of the woman that could listen to, comprehend and interpret orders—and carry them out with a stride like that.
He prolonged his backward look, and Melchard, below him, observed that it was directed over his head, and turned his eyes in the same direction.
He saw the girl running, pulled a weapon from his hip and tried a long shot.
The crack of the Browning had hardly reached her ears before Amaryllis was in the driving-seat. But not for a flicker did she turn her eyes from the business of the moment.
Melchard, with his left hand on his hip and the barrel of the automatic resting on the upturned elbow close to his chin, was on the point of firing again at the very moment when Mut-mut, having reached the top of the ridge, was running back to meet Dick, and Dick, coming down the slope at the best of his prodigious though uneven stride, was within two paces of Melchard's back.
At the sound of his rushing approach, and in the very act of firing, Melchard started. The shot went wide, and the man turned himself and his weapon on the enemy that was nearer even than he guessed.
In the very moment of wheeling about, he received a rugger hand-off on his right jaw, which launched him many yards, sideways down the slope, to land and turn literally heels over head as he fell.
His pistol fell more slowly and further, after describing a wavering arc over his head.
And then Dick Bellamy ran; ran as he had not run since he broke the tape in a certain sprint of four hundred metres at Buenos Ayres, in forty nine and a quarter seconds. But that was when his legs were an equal pair.
Amaryllis saw it all; Mut-mut on the sky-line of the ridge, hesitating; Melchard and his pistol in eccentric parabolas; Dick, with a wisp of black hair over his wounded cheek, "flying," she called it, down the last of the slope, and crossing the level ground to her and the car; a wild man running, she thought, with the pace of a racehorse, and the movement, not of a runaway, but of a winner. "And, oh!" she would say to him afterwards, "your funny eyes! How they blazed!"
Within four strides of the car.
"Let her rip," he grunted, and taking the low door of the tonneau in his stride, landed on the back seat.
The car rushed forward.
Dick looked round him. Melchard was on his feet, bent and searching the long grass and scrub of the lower slope.
"The beast's got some guts," muttered Dick.
Melchard stood erect and began to run towards them, slowly and painfully.
"He's found his gun," said Dick.
A raised arm and a sharp crack proved his words.