“No, señora, I cannot do that. El Cabeza said I was to stay here.”

“But does he imagine I would try to escape with a door to bar my way and two men with guns outside?” Skye asked scornfully.

Neengai looked serious.

“I think, señora,” she said slowly, “El Cabeza told me to stay here not to keep you a prisoner but to guard you.”

Her hand went to her side as she spoke and Skye saw with astonishment that she carried the long sharp cuchillo from which no gaucho is ever separated.

“To guard me?” she repeated in a different tone.

She remembered then the looks she had seen directed at her when she moved about the camp. She was used to ignoring the unwelcome attentions of men and yet the expression in those dark eyes, strange and varied as might be their faces, was always the same.

She would have been a fool not to realise that her fair skin and golden hair made her beauty all the more obvious in a land where women owed their hair and eyes to their Spanish ancestors and the darkness of their skins to the heat of the sun.

For a moment Skye felt herself shiver. She had laughed at Jimmy for being nervous as to what dangers might beset her, but now she understood a little of her own foolhardiness. This was a country of hot-blooded men and in their eyes she was desirable.

“Let me have a knife too,” she suggested to Neengai, but the Indian girl shook her head.

“No, no, señora. I will guard you well. I promise El Cabeza that if anything happened to you I would pay forfeit with my life.”

Skye put her hands up to her cheeks.

‘The cleverness of him!’ she thought.

It was almost unbearable that she must find the cunning workings of his mind at every turn. She hated him, hated him so much that the pain of the weals of her back seemed part of the aching hatred within her heart.

And yet it was possible to be bored without him.

“My watch must have stopped,” she said to Neengai half a dozen times during the day, only to find that the minutes were ticking by punctuated by yawns.

“I want to go out. Why should I stay here to stifle without air?” she stormed once, stamping her foot like a child who has been thwarted.

“El Cabeza will be home soon, señora,” Neengai said soothingly, an answer that brought no solace, only a feeling of horror that she must see him again.

How could she look him in the eyes after he had humiliated her in the very dust? How could she speak to him naturally when her hands were itching to strike him in the face for what he had done to her?

“God, the helplessness of being a woman,” Skye screamed aloud.

“Excusa, señora?” Neengai asked.