At last, though, he was able to recognize a few words in the local native tongue, but it was a long time before he could make any sense of what was being said. There was an argument--hot on one side, ice cold on the other. One man was urging action, to which the other appeared insolently indifferent. "If you don't kill him now--" "I know my business." "He is probably listening!" "Let him." "Can't you understand that the Englishman, Blake, will raise such a hue and cry that--" "I have understanding. I am not in need of advice from you." "By Jinendra's nose, I am not giving you advice! I order you!" "Order somebody who will obey you--some priest, for instance. I am no temple rat." "Too much success has made you insolent." "No. I was always insolent." "Suppose we should turn against you?" "That is not hard to imagine. You are sure to do it sooner or later. I am not afraid of you. You know why. Cease talking. You annoy me. It is not safe to annoy me." Some one took a cover off a lamp. The light hurt Quorn's eyes; he shut them for a moment. When he opened them again a man was squatting beside him, gazing at him. He was a man with a big head, crowned with a shock of shaggy hair that seemed to have been bleached to the color of new manila rope. He had dark eyebrows and a shaggy, dark beard and mustache that half hid and yet exaggerated the coarseness of a big mouth, around whose corners a sort of humor lurked. His nose was coarse and honeycombed with pock-marks. His big, full, deep-set eyes had humor of a sort too, but it was cruel humor; they would have been splendid eyes if they had had more color, but they were so light--gray, blue, green perhaps--as to look hardly human. "Why do you not go to the United States?" It was the bored voice that had pleaded insolence. Quorn lay still, trying whether he could move his wrists and ankles, wondering whether he could break the man's neck if he had his arms free. He felt an impulse to kill. Quorn was a man who had almost never raised his hand in violence; certainly he had never contemplated doing murder; he would have been willing to bet all his money, at any time, that he never would commit murder, and would never wish to do it. Yet he felt now he would almost rather kill that man who gazed at him than go on living. There was nothing to argue about, he just wanted to kill him. "Do you wish ever to see the United States again?" the man asked him, in the same cold, incurious voice. Quorn did not trust himself even to try to speak. He was working hard to regain possession of his senses, which recognized, in the man who was talking to him, something vaguely suggestive of his own peculiar influence over animals.