The other and younger girl sung out:  ‘I found you.’

Kiomi sent a volley at her.

‘I did,’ said the girl; ’yes, and I nursed you first, I did; and mother doctored you.  Kiomi hasn’t been here a day.’

The old mother came out of the tent.  She felt my pulse, and forthwith squatted in front of me.  ‘You’re hard to kill, and oily as a bean,’ said she.  ’You’ve only to lie quiet in the sun like a handsome gentleman; I’m sure you couldn’t wish for more.  Air and water’s the doctor for such as you.  You’ve got the bound in you to jump the ditch:  don’t you fret at it, or you’ll lose your spring, my good gentleman.’

‘Leave off talking to me as a stranger,’ I bawled.  ’Out with it; why have you kept me here?  Why did your men pitch into me?’

‘Our men, my good gentleman!’ the old woman ejaculated.  There was innocence indeed! sufficient to pass the whole tribe before a bench of magistrates.  She wheedled:  ’What have they against a handsome gentleman like you?  They’d run for you fifty mile a day, and show you all their tricks and secrets for nothing.’

My despot Kiomi fired invectives at her mother.  The old mother retorted; the girl joined in.  All three were scowling, flashing, showing teeth, driving the wordy javelin upon one another, indiscriminately, or two to one, without a pause; all to a sound like the slack silver string of the fiddle.

I sang out truce to them; they racked me with laughter; and such laughter!—­the shaking of husks in a half-empty sack.

Ultimately, on a sudden cessation of the storm of tongues, they agreed that I must have my broth.

Sheer weariness, seasoned with some hope that the broth would give me strength to mount on my legs and walk, persuaded me to drink it.  Still the old mother declared that none of her men would ever have laid hands on me.  Why should they? she asked.  What had I done to them?  Was it their way?

Kiomi’s arms tightened over my breast.  The involuntary pressure was like an illumination to me.

No longer asking for the grounds of the attack on a mistaken person, and bowing to the fiction that none of the tribe had been among my assailants, I obtained information.  The girl Eveleen had spied me entering Durstan.  Quite by chance, she was concealed near Bulsted Park gates when the groom arrived and told the lodge-keeper that Mr. Harry Richmond was coming up over the heath, and might have lost his way.  ‘Richmond!’ the girl threw a world of meaning into the unexpected name.  Kiomi clutched me to her bosom, but no one breathed the name we had in our thoughts.