But she also wondered at something else, for in that pause the blood-stained face had grown ghastlier than before, and Moya could not understand it. The man was so sorely stricken that recapture must now be his liveliest hope: why then should he fear a discovery more or less? And it was quite a little thing that Moya thought she had discovered; a little thing to him, not to her; and she proceeded to treat it as such.
"You know you're not Captain Bovill at all," she told him, in the quiet voice of absolutely satisfied conviction.
"Who told you that?" he roared, half raising himself for the first time, and the fear and fury in his eyes were terrible to see.
"But I know it all the same. I've known it this last half-hour. And if I hadn't I should know it now. I see it--where I ought to have seen it from the first--in your face."
"You mean because my son's not the dead spit of his father? But he never was; he took after his mother; he'll tell you that himself."
"It's not what I meant," said Moya, "though it is through the man you call your son that I know he is nothing of the kind. His father may have been a criminal; he was something else first; he would not have left a woman to perish of thirst in the bush, a woman who had done him no harm--who only wished to befriend him--who was going to marry his son!"
There were no oaths to this; but the black eyes gleamed shrewdly in the blood-stained face, and the conical head wagged where it lay.
"You never were in the hulks, you see," said the convict; "else you'd know. No matter what a man goes in, they all come out alike, brute beasts every one. I'm all that, God help me! But I'm the man--I'm the man. Do you think he'd have held out a finger to me if I hadn't been?"
"I've no doubt you convinced him that you were."
"How can one man convince another that he's his father?"
"I don't know. I only know that you have done it."
"Nonsense! He had never seen you before; he doesn't remember his father."
"Do you suppose he hasn't seen pictures, and heard plenty? No, no; all the rest's a true bill; but Captain Bovill I've lived, and Captain Bovill I'm going to die."
Moya looked at him closely. She could not help shuddering. He saw it, and the fear of death laid hold of him, even as he sweltered in the heat.