“But haven't you any plans?” asked Mrs. Vansittart, in despair. “What are you going to do? You are not going to let these brutes kill Tony Cornish? Surely you, as a soldier, must know how to meet this crisis.”
“Oh yes. Not much of a soldier, you know,” answered White, soothingly, as he moved away towards Uncle Ben. “But I think I know how this business ought to be managed. Come along--hide ourselves.”
He led the way across the dunes, dragging Uncle Ben by one arm, and keeping in the hollows. The two women followed in silence on the silent sand.
Once Major White paused and looked back. “Don't talk,” he said, holding up a large fat hand in a ridiculous gesture of warning, which he must have learnt in the nursery. He looked like a large baby listening for a bogey in the chimney.
Once or twice he consulted Uncle Ben, and as often glanced at his compass. There was a certain skill in his attitude and demeanour, as if he knew exactly what he was about. Mrs. Vansittart had a hundred questions to ask him, but they died on her lips. The moon rose suddenly over the distant trees and flooded all the sand-hills with light. Major White halted his little party in a deep hollow, and consulted Uncle Ben in whispers. Then bidding him sit down, he left the three alone in their hiding-place, and went away by himself. He climbed almost to the summit of a neighbouring mound, and stopped suddenly, with his face uplifted, as if smelling something. Like many short-sighted persons, he had a keen scent. In a few minutes he came back again.
“I have found them,” he whispered to Mrs. Vansittart and Dorothy. “Smelt 'em--like sealing-wax. Eleven of them--waiting there for Cornish.” And he smiled with a sort of boyish glee.
“What are you going to do?” whispered Mrs. Vansittart.
“Thump them,” he answered, and presently went back to his post of observation.
Uncle Ben had fallen asleep, and the two women stood side by side waiting in the moonlight. It was chilly, and a keen wind swept in from the sea. Dorothy shivered. They could hear certain notes of certain instruments in the band of the Scheveningen Kurhaus, nearly two miles away. It was strange to be within sound of such evidences of civilization, and yet in such a lonely spot--strange to reflect that eleven men were waiting within a few yards of them to murder one. And yet they could safely have carried out their intention, and have scraped a hole in the sand to hide his body, in the certainty that it would never be found; for these dunes are a miniature desert of Sahara, where nothing bids men leave the beaten paths, where certain hollows have probably never been trodden by the foot of man, and where the ever-drifting sand slowly accumulates--a very abomination of desolation.