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"Fever," laughed Saya Chone, "this fellow is absolutely safe against fever. You could no more give him jungle fever than you could make him ten feet high. A night here would give you a fever that would kill you in ten days, never him." Jack was puzzled once more, and said nothing. He resolved to ask his father what it all meant. But he soon found that this chance was not to be afforded him.
"Well," said Saya Chone at last, "are you not going to thank me for saving the life you seemed obstinately bent upon throwing away? If I had not been able to order a couple of fellows, as careless of their lives as you of yours, to go into the smoke and drag you out, it would have been all over with you by now." Jack made no answer. He did not so much as trouble to look at Saya Chone.
Saya Chone spoke to him and it sounded like a password, for the man sprang to his feet and stepped aside. The great bar of teak was drawn from its staples, and the door was opened. The Malay thrust Jack into the room, and the door was at once closed and barred behind him. Jack now found himself in a bare stone cell, lighted only by one small window eight feet or more from the ground.
"Orders, orders, I am acting under orders," murmured the half-caste, waving his brown hand in the air. "And I do not want you at all. It is merely my business to hand you over to my patron U Saw. It is he who wants you, not I." "And what does he want me for?" said Jack. "Ah," murmured Saya Chone, "that I shall not tell you now.
In any case, the first cord will not be pulled until an hour after sunset. Then," went on the half-caste, addressing himself to Mr. Haydon, "this is the cord which will be pulled," and he pointed to the cord fastened to Jack's net. Mr. Haydon ground his teeth. "If you don't want it pulled," purred Saya Chone softly, "you know what you have to do, a few words, nothing more.
Once on that heath in your queer, cold England, and again to-night. But as he was under strict orders on both occasions not to take your life, he spared you the last touch of his art, that sharp, neat twist which breaks his victim's spinal column as if he was snapping a bit of dry stick." Saya Chone turned to go, but paused at the door and looked over his shoulder.
"We shan't give way an inch. What do you think that half-caste said to me last thing before I was brought here to you?" He related the speech Saya Chone had made to him, and Mr. Haydon gave an uneasy movement of the shoulders. "Yes," he said, "they hope that you will plead with me, Jack, to give up the secret of the ruby-mine in order to save the pair of us."
He turned his head and saw the two Panthays fleeing to the uttermost part of the cave. They trembled before these terrible enemies. At this moment the Panthay tracker climbed into the cave. He spoke for a few moments to Saya Chone, pointing to the tunnel where Jack stood, but where in the darkness no one could see him.
Then the two immense creatures, head braced to head and tusks locked in tusks, began a steady trial of strength, each striving to force the other back. Now Saya Chone plucked out his heavy revolver, and, leaning over the edge of the howdah, began to fire swiftly into the head and body of the savage "rogue."
The figure was drawing aside the muslin veil from its head. As the soft shimmering folds of the delicate wrapper slipped away, Jack's heart leaped within him. He knew that face. This was no dancing girl. It was the half-caste in disguise. It was Saya Chone, the man who had stopped him on Rushmere Heath, the man who had slipped out of his clutch at Brindisi.
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