"With a lie on your lips?" said Moya, gravely.
"You know it isn't. Own it, for your own sake! Who can tell how long I shall be gone?"
"You shan't go! You shan't go!" he snarled and whined at once. And he clutched vainly at her skirts, the effort leaving him pale as death, and in as dire an agony.
"I must," said Moya. "There's the horse; the saddle's quite near; you shall have all the help that I can bring you, with all the speed that's possible."
She moved away, and the ruthless sun played on every inch of him once more.
"I'm burning--burning!" he yelled. "Have I been in hell upon earth all these years to go to hell itself before I die? Move me, for Christ's sake! Only get me into the shade, and I'll confess--I'll confess!"
Moya tried; but it was terrible; he shrieked with agony, foaming at the mouth, and beating her off with feeble fists. So then she flung herself bodily on an infant hop-bush, and actually uprooted it. And with this and some mallee-branches she made a gunyah over him, though he said it stifled him, and complained bitterly to the end. At the end of all Moya knelt at his feet.
"What promise?" he asked with an oath, for Moya had been milder than her word.
"Confess what?" he cried, a new terror in his eyes. "I'm not going to die! I don't feel like dying! I've no more to confess!"
"Oh, yes, you have--that you're not his father--nor yet Captain Bovill."
"But I tell you I am. Why--" and the pallid face lit up suddenly--"even the police know that, and you know that they know it!"
It was a random shot, but it made a visible mark, for in her instinctive certainty of the main fact Moya was only now reminded that Rigden himself had told her the same thing. Her discomfiture, however, was but momentary; she held obstinately to her intuition. The police might know it. She knew better than the police; and looking upon their quarry, and going over everything as she looked, came in a flash upon a fresh theory and a small fact in its support.
"Then they don't know who it is they're after!" cried Moya. "You're not even _their_ man; his eyes were brown; it was in the description; but yours are the blackest I ever saw."
It was not a good point. He might well make light of it. But it was enough for Moya and her woman's instinct; or so she said, and honestly thought for the moment. She was less satisfied when she had caught the horse and still must hear the mangled man; for he railed at her, from the gunyah she had built him, to the very end. And to Moya it seemed that there was more of triumph than of terror in his tone.