"Let us ride! O dear God, let us ride!" And until Hamet reached them, his head darted this way and that, while his eyes searched the trees. "Mind, you bought me," he said. "I belong to you; to no one else. How far from here to the sea?" "Nine days." "Nine days," and he counted them over on his fingers. Hamet brought up the mules. Charnock unrolled a burnous and a turban. Warriner plucked off his rags and put on the dress. Then the three men rode out between the olive trees, past the outer rampart of breached walls, into the open plain. "Shall we camp?" said Charnock. Warriner cast a look across his shoulder. Mequinez was still visible, a greyer blot upon the grey hillside. "No," said he. They rode forward over carpets of flowers, between the hills. The light fell; the marigolds paled beneath their mules' feet; the gentians became any flower of a light hue. At last a toothed savage screen of rock moved across Mequinez. "Here," said Warriner. He tumbled rather than dismounted from his mule, stretched his limbs out upon the grass, and in a moment was asleep. Hamet gathered a bundle of leaves from a dwarf palm tree and a few sticks, lit a fire, and cooked their supper. Charnock woke Warriner, who ate his meal and slept again; and all that night, with a Mouser pistol in his hand, Charnock sat by his side and guarded him. The next morning they started betimes; they passed a caravan, farther on a tent-village, and towards evening, from the shoulder of a hill they looked down upon the vast plain of the Sebou. Level as a sea it stretched away until the distinct colours of its flower-patches merged into one soft blue. "Eight days," said Warriner; and that night, as last night, he asked no questions of Charnock, but ate his supper and so slept; and that night again Charnock sat by his side and guarded him. But the next morning Warriner for the first time began to evince some curiosity as to his rescue and the man who had rescued him. The two men had just bathed in a little stream which ran tinkling through the grass beside their camp. Warriner was kneeling upon the bank of the stream and contemplating himself in the clear mirror of its water, when he said to Charnock: "How in the world did you know me?" "By your eyes." "We are not strangers, eh?" "I hailed you from a hansom cab once outside Lloyd's bank in Plymouth. You expressed an amiable wish that I should sit in that cab and rot away in my boots. Lucky for you I didn't!" "You were the man who jammed his finger? I remember; I thought you had got a warrant in your pocket. By the way," and he lifted his head quickly, "you never, I suppose, came across a man called Wilbraham?" "Ambrose?" "Yes, yes; when did you come across him?" "He was blackmailing your wife."