tt was not of their number, and he dared not ask for him. He continued
his search for best part of an hour, up one of those lanes and then
down another. Once an overseer challenged him, demanding to know his
business. He was looking, he said, for Dr. Blood. His cousin was
taken ill. The overseer bade him go to the devil, and get out of the
plantation. Blood was not there. If he was anywhere he would be in his
hut in the stockade.

Nuttall passed on, upon the understanding that he would go. But he went
in the wrong direction; he went on towards the side of the plantation
farthest from the stockade, towards the dense woods that fringed it
there. The overseer was too contemptuous and perhaps too languid in the
stifling heat of approaching noontide to correct his course.

Nuttall blundered to the end of the avenue, and round the corner of
it, and there ran into Pitt, alone, toiling with a wooden spade upon an
irrigation channel. A pair of cotton drawers, loose and ragged, clothed
him from waist to knee; above and below he was naked, save for a broad
hat of plaited straw that sheltered his unkempt golden head from the
rays of the tropical sun. At sight of him Nuttall returned thanks aloud
to his Maker. Pitt stared at him, and the shipwright poured out his
dismal news in a dismal tone. The sum of it was that he must have ten
pounds from Blood that very morning or they were all undone. And all he
got for his pains and his sweat was the condemnation of Jeremy Pitt.

"Damn you for a fool!" said the slave. "If it's Blood you're seeking,
why are you wasting your time here?"

"I can't find him," bleated Nuttall. He was indignant at his reception.
He forgot the jangled state of the other's nerves after a night of
anxious wakefulness ending in a dawn of despair. "I thought that
you...."

"You thought that I could drop my spade and go and seek him for you? Is
that what you thought? My God! that our lives should depend upon such a
dummerhead. While you waste your time here, the hours are passing! And
if an overseer should catch you talking to me? How'll you explain it?"

For a moment Nuttall was bereft of speech by such ingratitude. Then he
exploded.

"I would to Heaven I had never had no hand in this affair. I would so! I
wish that...."

What else he wished was never known, for at that moment round the block
of cane came a big man in biscuit-coloured taffetas followed by two
negroes in cotton drawers who were armed with cutla