ut he
might have tipped me a wink or something. I nearly jumped out of my
skin. Scared ain't in it! I didn't even know who had fired. Everything
had been so still just before that the bang of the shot seemed
the loudest noise I had ever heard. The honourable Antonio pitches
forward--they always do, towards the shot; you must have noticed that
yourself--yes, he pitches forward on to the embers, and all that lot of
hair on his face and head flashes up like a pinch of gunpowder. Greasy,
I expect; always scraping the fat off them alligators' hides--"

"Look here," exclaimed Schomberg violently, as if trying to burst some
invisible bonds, "do you mean to say that all this happened?"

"No," said Ricardo coolly. "I am making it all up as I go along, just to
help you through the hottest part of the afternoon. So down he pitches
his nose on the red embers, and up jumps our handsome Pedro and I at the
same time, like two Jacks-in-the-box. He starts to bolt away, with his
head over his shoulder, and I, hardly knowing what I was doing, spring
on his back. I had the sense to get my hands round his neck at once, and
it's about all I could do to lock my fingers tight under his jaw. You
saw the beauty's neck, didn't you? Hard as iron, too. Down we both went.
Seeing this the governor puts his revolver in his pocket.

"'Tie his legs together, sir,' I yell. 'I'm trying to strangle him.'

"There was a lot of their fibre-lines lying about. I gave him a last
squeeze and then got up.

"'I might have shot you,' says the governor, quite concerned.

"'But you are glad to have saved a cartridge, sir,' I tell him.

"My jump did save it. It wouldn't have done to let him get away in
the dark like that, and have the beauty dodging around in the bushes,
perhaps, with the rusty flint-lock gun they had. The governor owned up
that the jump was the correct thing.

"'But he isn't dead,' says he, bending over him.

"Might as well hope to strangle an ox. We made haste to tie his elbows
back, and then, before he came to himself, we dragged him to a small
tree, sat him up, and bound him to it, not by the waist but by the
neck--some twenty turns of small line round his throat and the trunk,
finished off with a reef-knot under his ear. Next thing we did was to
attend to the honourable Antonio, who was making a great smell frizzling
his face on the red coals. We pushed and rolled him into the creek, and
left the rest to the alligators.

"I was tired. T