'Friends,' replied Clayton. 'Sing Tai told us about you. So we came and got you.'
'Sing Tai is not dead?'
'No, but badly wounded.'
Alam spoke to her then and reassured her. 'You are safe now,' he said. 'I have heard that Americans can do anything. Now I believe it.'
'These are Americans?' she asked incredulously. 'Have they landed at last?'
'Only these few. Their plane was shot down.'
'That was a pretty cute trick, Colonel,' said Bubono-vitch. 'It certainly fooled them.'
'It came near doing worse than that to me, because I forgot to caution you as to the direction of your fire. Two bullets came rather too close to me for comfort.' He turned to the girl. 'Do you feel strong enough to walk the rest of the night?' he asked.
'Yes, quite,' she replied. 'You see I am used to walking. I have been doing a lot of it for the past two years, keeping out of the way of the Japs.'
'For two years?'
'Yes, ever since the invasion. I have been hiding in the mountains all this time, Sing Tai and I.' Clayton drew her out, and she told her story—the flight from the plantation, the death of her mother, the murder of her father and Lum Kam, the treachery of some natives, the loyalty of others.
They reached the village of Tiang Umar at dawn, but they remained there only long enough to get food; then they moved on, all but Alam. A plan had been worked out during the night. It was based on the belief that the Japs would eventually return to this village to look for the girl. Furthermore Corrie wished to have nothing done that would jeopardize the safety of these people who had befriended her.
Corrie and Sing Tai knew of many hiding places in the remote fastnesses of the mountains. They had been forced to move closer to Tiang Umar's village because of their inability to get proper or sufficient food for themselves in these safer locations. But now it would be different. The Americans could do anything.
They had been forced to leave Sing Tai behind, as he was in no condition to travel. Tiang Umar assured them that he could hide the Chinese where the Japs could not find him if they should return to the village.
'If I can, I shall let you know where I am, Tiang Umar,' said Corrie; 'then, perhaps, you will send Sing Tai to me when he is strong enough to travel.'
Corrie led the party deep into the wilds of the mountain hinterland. Here there were rugged gorges and leaping streams, forests of teak, huge stands of bamboo, open mountain meadows man deep with tough grasses.
Lucas and Clayton had decided to go thus deeper into the mountains and then cut to the southeast before turning toward the coast. In this way they would avoid the area in which the plane had crashed, where the Japs had probably already instituted a thorough search. They would also encounter few if any villages whose inhabitants might put Japs upon their trail.
Clayton often foraged ahead for food, always returning with something. It might be partridge or pheasant, sometimes deer. And now at their camps he made fire, so that the Americans could cook their food.
On the trail, Clayton and Corrie always led the way, then came Bubonovitch, with Lucas and Shrimp bringing up the rear, keeping as far away from the Dutch girl as possible. They were unreconciled to the presence of a woman. It was not so much that Corrie might jeopardize their chances to escape. It was just that they objected to women on general principles.
'But I suppose we gotta put up wit de dame,' said Rosetti. 'We can't leaf the Japs get her.'
Jerry Lucas agreed. 'If she were a man, or even a monkey, it wouldn't be so bad. But I just plain don't have any time for women.'
'Some dame double-cross you?' asked Shrimp.
'I could have forgiven her throwing me over for a 4-F as soon as I was out of sight,' said Jerry, 'but the so- and-so was a Republican into the bargain.'
'She ain't hard to look at,' conceded Shrimp, grudgingly.
'They're the worst,' said Jerry. 'Utterly selfish and greedy. Always gouging some one. Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! That's all they think of. If you ever decide to marry, Shrimp,' advised Jerry, pedantically, 'marry an old bag who'd be grateful to any one for marrying her.'
'Who wants to marry an old bag?' demanded Shrimp.
'You wouldn't have to worry about wolves.'
'Whoever marries dis little Dutch number'll have plenty to worry about. All de wolves in de woods'll be howlin' round his back door. Ever notice dem lamps w'en she smiles?'
'You falling for her, Shrimp?'
'Hell, no; but I got eyes, ain't I?'
'I never look at her,' lied Jerry.
Just then a covey of partridges broke cover. Clayton already had an arrow fitted to his bow. Instantly the string twanged and a partridge fell. The man's movements were as swift and sure and smooth as the passage of light.
'Geez!' exclaimed Rosetti. 'I give. The guy's not human. Howinell did he know them boids was goin' to bust out? How could he hit 'em with dat t'ing?'
Jerry shook his head. 'Search me. He probably smelled 'em, or heard 'em. Lots of the things he does are just plain uncanny.'
'I'm goin' to learn to shoot one of dem t'ings,' said Shrimp.
Presently, Rosetti overcame his Anglophobia sufficiently to permit him to ask Clayton to show him how to make a bow and arrows. Lucas and Bubonovitch expressed a similar desire. The next day Clayton gathered the necessary materials, and they all set to work under his guidance to fashion weapons, even to Come.
The Dutch girl braided the bow strings from fibers from the long tough grasses they found in open spaces in the mountains. Clayton shot birds for the feathers, and taught the others how properly to fletch their arrows. The fashioning of the weapons was a pleasant interlude to long days of scaling cliffs, battling through jungle undergrowth, marching down one declivity only to climb up once more to descend another. It was the first time that the five had had any protracted social intercourse, for after each hard day's march their greatest need had been sleep.
The Dutch girl sat near Jerry Lucas. He watched her nimble fingers braiding the fibers, and thought that she had pretty hands—small and well shaped. He noticed, too, that notwithstanding two years of bitter hardships she still gave attention to her nails. He glanced at his own, ruefully. Somehow, she always looked trim and neat. How she accomplished it was beyond him.
'It will be fun to hunt with these,' she said to him in her precise, almost Oxford English.
'If we can hit anything,' he replied. She speaks better English than I, he thought.
'We must practice a great deal,' she said. 'It is not right that we four grown-up people should be dependent upon Colonel Clayton for everything, as though we were little children.'
'No,' he said.
'Is he not wonderful?'
Jerry mumbled a 'Yes,' and went on with his work. With awkward, unaccustomed fingers he was trying to fletch an arrow. He wished the girl would keep still. He wished she were in Halifax . Why did there have to be girls around to spoil a man's world?
Carrie glanced up at him, puzzled. Her eyes reflected it. Then she noticed his awkward attempts to hold a feather in place and fasten it there with a bit of fiber. 'Here,' she said. 'Let me help you. You hold the feather and I'll bind the fiber around the shaft. Hold it close in the groove. There, that's right.' Her hands, passing the fiber around the arrow, often touched his. He found the contact pleasant; and because he found it so, it made him angry.
'Here,' he said, almost rudely, 'I can do this myself. You need not bother.'
She looked up at him, surprised. Then she went back to braiding the bow strings. She did not say anything, but in that brief glance when their eyes had met he had seen surprise and hurt in hers. He had seen the same once in a deer he had shot, and he had never again shot a deer.
You're a damned heel, he thought of himself. Then, with a great effort of will power, he said, 'I am sorry. I did not mean to be rude.'
