“But have you really been to the hut?”

“Rather!”

“And where’s our guide?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be bothered with a guide all to myself.”

“My dear young man, you might have stepped straight into a crevasse!”

“I precious nearly did,” laughed Bob, again with something odd about his laughter; “but I say, do you know, if you won’t think me awfully rude, I’ll push on back and get changed.  I’m as hot as anything and not fit to be seen.”

And he was gone after very little more than a minute from first to last, gone with rather an elaborate salute to Mrs. Lascelles, and rather a cavalier nod to me.  But then neither of us had made any effort to detain him and a notable omission I thought it in Mrs. Lascelles, though to the lad himself it may well have seemed as strange in the old friend as in the new.

“What was it,” asked Mrs. Lascelles, when we were on our way home, “that you were going to say about Mr. Evers when he appeared in the flesh in that extraordinary way?”

“I forget,” said I, immorally.

“Really?  So soon?  Don’t you remember, I thought you meant that he couldn’t take care of himself, and you were just going to tell me what you did mean?”

“Oh, well, it wasn’t that, because he can!”

But, as a matter of fact, I had seen my way to taking care of Master Bob without saying a word either to him or to Mrs. Lascelles, or at all events without making enemies of them both.

CHAPTER VII

SECOND FIDDLE

My plan was quite obvious in its simplicity, and not in the least discreditable from my point of view.  It was perhaps inevitable that a boy like Bob should imagine I was trying to “cut him out,” as my blunt friend Quinby phrased it to my face.  I had not, of course, the smallest desire to do any such vulgar thing.  All I wanted was to make myself, if possible, as agreeable to Mrs. Lascelles as this youth had done before me, and in any case to share with him all the perils of her society.  In other words I meant to squeeze into “the imminent deadly breach” beside Bob Evers, not necessarily in front of him.  But if there was nothing dastardly in this, neither was there anything heroic, since I was proof against that kind of deadliness if Bob was not.

On the other hand, the whole character of my mission was affected by the decision at which I had now arrived.  There was no longer a necessity to speak plainly to anybody.  That odious duty was eliminated from my plan of campaign, and the “frontal attack” of recent history discarded for the “turning movement” of the day.  So I had learnt something in South Africa after all.  I had learnt how to avoid hard knocks which might very well do more harm than good to the cause I had at heart.  That cause was still sharply defined before my mind.  It was the first and most sacred consideration.  I wrote a reassuring despatch to Catherine Evers, and took it myself to the little post-office opposite the hotel that very evening before dressing for dinner.  But I cannot say that I was thinking of Catherine when I proceeded to spoil three successive ties in the tying.