"God in heaven!" he muttered in a foreign tongue. "What dost Thou here?"
Boy needed no question as to his wants. "Oh, please!" he panted, "take me home. I wanted to kill Vile John with the sword as Kunder sharped; but now I'd wather, please, give the Chrishmus fings--the peace, you know, an' all that--please, sir. I weally would wather--"
A sudden smile, half bitter, came to the man's bewildered face. "You wanted to kill Vile John," he said in English. "Why?"
"Oh, I don't know--but I don't want to now. I'd wather bring the peace."
And then silently the rain had begun--not rain such as Christmas usually brings in India, but the downpour as from a bucket which comes at times after long drought; rain before which nothing can stand, which seems to wash the world and the men in it from all things save a desire for shelter.
"God in heaven!" exclaimed the man, reverting to his own tongue. "We shall be drowned if we stop here. Come, little rat! Let us find a spot where we can keep dry."
A difficult job even for this man--Viljeon, prince of veldt roamers--to whom this country with its rapidly filling watercourses, its wide stretches of flood-land, was almost familiar. Seen, indeed, by the rapid shimmer of the lightning as he steered his way, the instinct of a pioneer waking in him at every step, he could scarce believe he was not mastering an African drift.
And the child cuddled close to his breast, wrapped for shelter in his coat? Who was this child which he held as if it had been his own--the child with its travesty of wings, its travesty of a sword?
Half bewildered as he was, the humour, the pathos of the strange chance made his heart softer, and his eyes grew keener, not only for himself but for his charge, as the danger increased minute by minute.
At first, mixed with his desire for present shelter had been that of future escape for himself. But by degrees the thought of the child came uppermost. Safety for it lay on different lines from safety to a strong man untrammelled; and the instinct of the veldtsman told him that the former was on the higher ground near the cantonment--near the prison he had left!
So, through the incessant rain, he threaded his way wading waist-deep at times, till on a rising bit of land the lightning showed him a ruined mud hovel. It might serve for shelter and rest for the time: if the flood rose to it he could but go on.