Clive noticed that during the last two hours of this seemingly endless pass, Sefton’s brandy-flask went very often to his lips.
Their strip of blue sky overhead presently told them that the sun was setting, the deep, level blue catching all sorts of wondrous tints, changeful, oscillating, undefinable as the colours in a dove’s wing.
Then these, too, in their turn vanished, leaving what had been level blue before level grey now, deepening in parts into the night blue of an Italian sky.
And then a slow, white radiance spreading athwart this, told them that the moon had risen.
Straight in front of them their path took a sudden sharp curve.
Sefton and Clive were walking side by side now, and the guides were following with the four mules.
“When we round that curve we get in sight of Alta Lauria,” said Sefton.
He stood still for a moment, leaning his back against a huge block of granite which might have suggested the thought that the Titans, when building the mountains, had let fall one of their bricks.
“Better mount,” said Clive; “you’re getting footsore.”
During this, the last day of their journey together, his heart had softened towards his companion in a way that, taking all things into consideration, seemed even to himself unaccountable.
Sefton, however, had no intention of mounting. He let the guides with their mules pass on ahead, then he lowered his voice almost to a whisper.
“Redway,” he said, “I’ve been thinking over a good many things during the last half-hour, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’ll be of no use for either of us to show fight.”
“Show fight! Where, when, how?” asked Clive, looking all round as if in search of some hidden foe, and feeling instinctively for his revolver.
“That’ll be of no use to you,” said Sefton, noting the movement; “if one of those skulking cowards attacks us there’ll be at least half-a-dozen in hiding to back him up. Besides—” here he broke off with a short laugh, “we won’t have unnecessary bloodshed. They’d rather not touch you if it can be helped—it’s me—my life they want—not yours.”
“Why must there be any attacking?” said Clive. “We’ve got so far on our journey unmolested. Alta Lauria is almost in sight now. There’s no sign of anyone skulking about.”
His eye scanned the rocks right and left of him as he ended his sentence.
“They wouldn’t be such fools as to attack us here,” replied Sefton; “there’s no hiding-place out of which they could take sure aim. It would be a case of fair fight, man to man, face to face. No, wait till we’ve rounded that point there, straight ahead of us, and you’ll see what I mean.”
Clive suddenly paused, looking Sefton straight in the face.
“Do you suppose,” he cried, with a fierce impetuosity for which the other was not prepared, “that I’ve travelled with you side by side all these miles, and then intend to stand by and see you butchered? Do you imagine I’ve brought my revolver for nothing?”
Sefton grew excited also.
“That’s it,” he cried. “I knew that was in your mind. It would be madness—sheer madness for you to attempt that sort of thing. Supposing you put a bullet into a man, what then? There’d be a dozen knives out at you at once. And then what becomes of Ida?”
That was a question not easy to answer. Clive remained silent.
Sefton went on:
“What are those fellows in front good for? Would they go on to the Palazzo and be a safe conduct for Ida back to England? No. They’d just run away as fast as their legs would carry them, or else fraternise with the scoundrels who had knocked us over. No, you must do as I tell you. Promise me.”
There fell a long silence. The crack of the whips of the muleteers, their loud-voiced “Hola, huepe!” to the animals, together with a jangling of bells, broke the intense stillness; but there came never a word from Clive.
Sefton went on impetuously as before.
“I want your word of honour—nothing else will satisfy me—that if I am attacked you won’t show fight, but will push straight on with the guides to the Palazzo, demand to see Ida, and then not trust her out of your sight till you get clear of this accursed hole. Will you do this?—give me your word of honour that you will.”
“Upon my life, Culvers, I can’t,” Clive exclaimed, vehemently, “or if I did, it would be of no use. I’m confident if I saw a rifle pointed at you, or a knife raised, I should forget all about my word of honour, and out with my revolver at once.”
The two men had again come to a standstill in the narrow pass, and were now facing each other. On their right hand the rocks rose straight and sheer, with never a break in them; on their left a huge rift let in a gleam of the fast-fading twilight, showed a vista of fantastic yet still perpendicular rocks beyond, showed, too, the deep black chasm that their path was skirting.
“What is your revolver like?” asked Sefton. “Six-chambered, I suppose?”
Clive, thinking that he was weighing the chances of its being of use to them, drew it from his pocket and handed it to him.
“It’s simply perfect. I know of no better make,” he said.
Sefton looked at it critically, then he made a step towards the rift in the rocks which let in the twilight, as if to get a better view of the toy-like weapon.
And then, before Clive could realise what was in his mind, he had leaned over the blocks and boulders which separated their path from the precipice it skirted, and the revolver was flung into the darkness of the chasm.
Clive turned upon him furiously.
“You’d no right to do such a thing,” he cried; “it was treacherous of you. At least you should have given me a choice in the matter.”
Sefton, for once in his life, met anger with calmness.
“I tell you you have no choice in the
