"How so?" the Emperor asked Bo, intrigued by where the soldier was going with this.
"Your Majesty sent Major Pittman and his patrol after your women and the Honour Guard who failed to come back. Rutherglen was only there as a tracker. I assume his answer as to why he was the sole survivor is because he went to the tubiàn snakes' nest but didn't participate in the fighting?"
"You might be on the right track. But where are you going with this meandering tale, soldier?"
"When I walked the perimeter of that nest after I woke up from that blow to the head, there were no tracks out, only in. I'll admit I'm not a tracker, so perhaps I might have missed a handful of outbound footprints, if there were only one or two survivors. I was looking for horse tracks or a large group of shoe prints.