She stopped for a moment and composed herself.
“Crime killed my father. I want to wipe that out by working against crime. With you.”
There was a pause. The pale, inexorable eyes searched her to the soul. Then Benson’s hand went out, and the steely fingers gave her hand a man’s grasp.
MacMurdie was his dour self again.
“Ye’re plannin’ great and noble things, my girl,” he glowered sarcastically. “But how’ll we get out to do ’em? We’re stuck here in the jungle. Our plane was blown up. The gang’s plane is under half of Mexico—”
“You pessimistic Scot!” said Smitty. “Haven’t you got feet? We’re hardly a hundred miles from the coast. There’ll be a coast town where we can get a tramp ship to an airport. All we’ll lose is a few days’ time.”
Wrangling amiably, they went to the edge of the cliff and started descending to make camp for the night. Nellie paused a moment beside the man who was now her chief.
He was staring with pale, basilisk eyes over the jumbled thousands of tons of rock. Thinking of the human rats lying beneath, sent to death by their own leader? No. Thinking of the vast wealth lying there to be tapped by themselves alone whenever they should need any of it? No.
Nellie didn’t think either of these things was behind the colorless eyes that flared like ice in a glacial dawn. She thought she knew what he was thinking.
Of a woman for whose sweetness he had lived; of a child for whose promise he had worked. Wife and small daughter, snatched from him by crime.
He was thinking of them — and dedicating his remaining bleak existence anew to the fighting of crime.
Nellie turned and went softly away, leaving him to the chill and dangerous immensity of his thoughts.