The Daredevil Snared (The Adventurers Quartet Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

was—was that his single-minded quest for effectiveness and efficiency meant he considered keeping his workforce as hale, healthy, and able as possible to be in his and his masters’ best interests.
    So regardless of his threats—which not a single one of them doubted he would carry out without a blink if they pushed him to it—he ensured that their needs were met so that they could continue to work and produce the raw diamonds his masters sought.
    That was what Dubois was being very well paid to ensure—that the mine was properly exploited and the raw diamonds dispatched in secret to Amsterdam on behalf of his masters.
    Just who those masters were, no one had yet learned. However, although Dubois was French and his band of mercenaries hailed from every quarter, the general consensus among the captives was that the blackguards behind the scheme were Englishmen.
    Katherine dwelled on that for several seconds, then shook the thought aside. Time enough to focus on whom to blame after they’d escaped.
    She and Harriet rounded the base of the tower, passing the supply hut and, beside it, the large kitchen with its wide, palm-frond-covered overhang beneath which three small fire pits with cook pots suspended above them were watched over by Dubois’s huge cook. The man was the grumpiest individual Katherine had ever met, perennially scowling at everyone—even Dubois.
    They continued circling the mercenaries’ barracks, on their left passing the long barrack-like building in which all the women and children slept, followed by the compound’s double gates, as usual propped wide open with a pair of guards lounging, one to each side.
    The roughly circular compound was crudely but effectively palisaded by planks lashed together with thick vines and wire. It appeared rather rickety in places and wouldn’t be impossible to break through, but if they escaped and fled, where would they go?
    The simple fact that they had no real clue where they were and how far it might be to any form of safe harbor, along with the knowledge of the hideous retribution Dubois would unquestionably inflict on those left behind should any of them successfully flee, ensured that they continued apparently acquiescent in their captivity.
    They were anything but, yet circumstances and Dubois had forced them to be pragmatic.
    They couldn’t escape unless they got everyone out all at once and until they knew in which direction safety lay and how long it would take them to reach it.
    Skirting the captives’ communal area—a circle of logs surrounding a large fire pit—Katherine and Harriet walked slowly past the long building where the men slept and on past the open maw of the mine. Unless dispatched on some other chore, all the male captives labored inside the tunnel, now more than fifty yards long, that had been hacked, inch by foot, more or less straight into the side of a steep hill that rose abruptly from the jungle floor, as if some elemental force had thrust it upward. The hillside above the mine entrance was relatively sheer.
    As she and Harriet passed the mine, they both looked inside. Although lanternlight played on the walls, glinting off the roughly hewn planes, none of the men were presently visible; they would all be farther down, hacking out the remnants of the original deposit, or with Dixon supposedly examining the second pipe—a rock formation associated with diamonds—that Dixon had, thank the Lord, discovered to the right of the original find.
    If he hadn’t found that second pipe, the mine would already be on its last legs, and they would be facing death.
    That new deposit had given them a second wind, as it were, in that it held out the chance of surviving long enough to figure out some way to escape.
    That it was up to them to save themselves was now accepted by all. Initially, they’d waited, simply surviving, in the expectation that help would arrive in the form of a rescue party sent from the settlement.
    It had seemed