Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/16

14 "Him finish," he said, and the cluck of his tongue was pure satisfaction.

"I wish you were going to be lynched," said Dick unemotionally. "I'd invite every man along the river to mark you. I imagine you're responsible for this, eh? It's probably the Sergeant from Grey Wolf by his stripes. But"

His voice broke short as he pulled the white face up across his knee in the red level track of the light. Stark river and clearing, and pines blackening in the night changed in a flash to an orchard of bees and apple-blossoms; to a scent of thyme that sickened his memory to this day, and to a girl's sobbing voice saying words that did not hold Tempest's name and that yet were full of Tempest. A cruel look came into his eyes as he stared down on the still face with the short drooped upper lip and the well-set jaw and throat.

"If you married her she made you pay for it, or you wouldn't be here," he said to it. "And if you didn't—was it she who lied, and not you?"

The face gave no answer. The red rays slid off it, leaving it ashen. And then Dick took in his hands the body of this man whose heart he once had known and tended it skilfully; binding the forearm that was broken just below the elbow, and strapping as best he might the flesh that a dead snag in the river had ripped open.

"Spilt out of his canoe, of course," he said. "You have a clean sheet there, Moonias. Unless—did you bring him in?"

The breed grunted. He seemed to feel no hate towards Dick, no interest in the man whom he had salvaged from the river.

"Aha," he said. "But him no gun. No use him."

Dick's brief smile had a little bitter twist to it.

"We are not all so frank regarding the reasons for our actions, my friend," he said, lightly. "Now, if"

And then Tempest opened his eyes wide and wondering as a child's, and looked up at the man above him. He seemed like one in a waking dream, who hears the ghosts of other years light-heeled about his head.

"The wind is bitter bad across the Barren Lands to-