The Dust of Conflict by Harold Bindloss

THERE was no wind, and the night was very still, when Appleby lay aching in every limb behind an aloe hedge which cut off the dim white road. Harper sat on the steaming earth close beside him contemplatively munching the end of a cigar, for smoking was distinctly inadvisable just then, and he was in need of something to stay the pangs of hunger. Here and there a dusky figure showed among the leaves, and now and then a low murmur or a soft rustling rose from the black shadow of the overhanging palms; but the scarcely audible sound sank once more into the silence, and a muleteer had just passed along the dusty road apparently without the faintest suspicion that rather more than a hundred famishing men had watched him with fingers tightening on their rifle barrels. He saw and heard nothing, which was fortunate for him, and now his voice and the tramp of his team came back faintly across the cane.

The dew was heavy, as it usually is in the tropics when a clear, still night follows a day of scorching heat, and Appleby could have wrung it from the garments he had borrowed from the Alcalde's wardrobe at Santa Marta. That, however, did not trouble him, for they rested with a pleasant coolness upon his sun-scorched skin; and he was mainly conscious of a sense of emptiness and a distressful stitch in his side as he watched the strip of road. It wound out from the inky shadows of the palms, led by the hedge of aloes, and was lost again in the cane that stretched away, a dim sweep of dusky green, under the moon. It was at least a week since he had had an adequate meal, and he had passed that day crawling through a mangrove swamp, where pits of foul black mire lay beneath the great slimy roots.