'Beasts kill, aye, but they do not torture. That is reserved for men.'
'Leave be, al of you,' Cooper ordered in a paradeground voice.
'Yes, you too, Caleb. Such squabbling avails us nothing, the more so when a life's at stake.'
The guard's plainspoken good sense was obvious to everyone, though Wingfield could not help adding, 'See you remember we know it is a rescue now, Henry. I charge you, do nothing to put Joanna at risk.'
Dale nodded gruffly.
The Englishmen hurried on; hope put fresh heart in them and sped their weary feet. Soon they were going down into marshier country again as they approached the York River, which paral eled the James to the north.
They al kept peering ahead for a telltale smudge of smoke against the sky.
Darkness fell before they found it. They had to stop, for fear of losing the sims' trail. Wingfield drew first watch. He sat in the warm darkness, wishing he had some way to let Anne know what he had found.
His wife would still be suffering the agony of fear and uncertainty he had felt until that afternoon, and would keep on suffering it until he brought their daughter home.
He refused to think of failing. He had before, when he thought Joanna dead. But having come so close, he felt irrationally sure things would somehow work out. He fought that feeling too. It could make him careless, and bring all his revived dreams to nothing.
When he surrendered sentry duty to Lucas, he thought he would be too keyed up to sleep. As it had back in his own bed, though, exhaustion took its tol ; the damp ground might have been a goosedown mattress ten feet thick.
if Henry Dale spotted the sims' fire first. The Englishmen were much closer to it than they had been to the one a couple of days before, for it was smaller and not as smoky. The hour was just past noon.
'We wait here,' Allan Cooper decreed, 'so we may approach by night and lessen the danger of being tdiscovered.' They soon found that danger was real.
A sim on its way back to the fire walked within a double handful of paces of their hiding place. By luck, it was carrying a fawn it had kil ed, and did not notice them.
'Ah, venison,' Caleb Lucas sighed softly, gnawing on smoked meat tough enough to patch the soles of his boots.
The wait seemed endless to Wingfield; the sun crawled across the sky. To be so close and yet unable to do anything to help his daughter ate at him. But getting himself kil ed with an ill-considered rush would do her no good either.
The Englishmen made low-voiced plans. All had to be tentative.
So much depended on where Joanna was around the fire, what the sims were doing to her (Wingfield would not let himself consider Henry Dale's notion), how many sims there were, how much surprise the rescuers could achieve.
At last the birds of day began to fall silent. The sky went gold and crimson in the west, deep blue and then purple overhead. When stars came out not far from where the sun had set, Al an Cooper nudged his fellows. 'Now we move cannily, mind.'
The guard led them as they crept toward the fire. He was humming a Spanish tune under his breath. Wingfield did not think he knew he was doing it. But he had learned his soldiering against Spanish troops, and a return to it brought back old habits.
This band of sims dwelt in more open country than had the other.
The Englishmen could not get very close. Half their plans, the ones involving unexpectedly bursting from the woods and snatching up Joanna, evaporated on the instant. They whispered curses and watched from the nearest shrubbery.
At first glance the scene in front of them did not seem much different from the one they had watched a couple of nights before.
There were more sims here, perhaps as many as forty. Three or four males were roasting roots and bits of meat on sticks over the fire, and passing the chunks of food to sims who stood round waiting.
Another male was cutting up an animal that, with its skin removed, Wingfield could not identify. He stiffened. That was no stone tool the sim used; it was a good steel knife. Henry Dale noticed that at about the same time he did. 'Damned thieving creatures,' he muttered.
A female set the young one it was holding down on the ground, then rose and ambled away from the fire, probably to relieve itself. The infant followed it with its eyes and shrieked in distress. The adult came back and played with it, dandling it in its arms, rol ing it about, and making faces at it. After the child was quiet, the female left it again.
This time, it stayed quiet until its mother returned.
This band did not have one firekeeper as the other had.
From time to time, a female or young male would come up to the blaze and toss on a branch or a shrub. The system seemed haphazard to Wingfield, but the fire never looked likely to go out.
A group of sims had gathered on the far side of the fire around something their bodies kept Wingfield from making out. Whatever it was, it mightily interested them. Some stood, others hunkered down on their haunches for a closer look. They pointed and jabbered; once one shook another, as if to get a point across. Wingfield could not help chuckling to himself, they reminded him of so many Englishmen at a public house.
Then the chuckle died in his throat, for he saw that one of the males there had a great glob of mud plastered to the hair from its rib cage.
The sim moved slowly and painfully.
Wingfield touched Cooper's arm. 'On my oath, that is the one I fought. I knew I marked him with my knife.'
'Then we tracked truly, as I thought. Good. Now we, ' Wingfield's hand clamped down tight on the guard's
