The foxes had already made their burrows
there."
The smile faded from Ethne's face, but she looked again at the white
feather lying in her palm, and she laughed with a great contentment. It
was yellow with the desert dust. It was a proof that in this story there
was to be no word of failure.
"Go on," she said.
Willoughby related the despatch of the negro with the donkey to Abou
Fatma at the Wells of Obak.
"Feversham stayed for a fortnight in Berber," Willoughby continued. "A
week during which he came every morning to the well and waited for the
return of his negro from Obak, and a week during which that negro
searched for Yusef, who had once sold rock-salt in the market-place. I
doubt, Miss Eustace, if you can realise, however hard you try, what that
fortnight must have meant to Feversham--the anxiety, the danger, the
continued expectation that a voice would bid him halt and a hand fall
upon his shoulder, the urgent knowledge that if the hand fell, death
would be the least part of his penalty. I imagine the town--a town of
low houses and broad streets of sand, dug here and there into pits for
mud wherewith to build the houses, and overhead the blistering sun and
a hot shadowless sky.
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