"Be careful, sir! The hollow is full of ruts and broken stones! She is too heavy—You stagger and reel like a craft that has lost her helm! Steady, sir—steady, or she'll be hurt!"
James Harrington stopped suddenly, as if a war trumpet had checked his progress. His face changed in the burning light. His arms relaxed around the form they had clasped so firmly a moment before.
"Take her!" he said, with an imploring look. "Take her! I am very weak. You see how I falter—Take her, Benson. She is not heavy, it is only I that have lost all strength!"
Ben reached forth his brawny arms, as we sometimes see a great school-boy receive a baby sister, and folded them reverently around the form which Harrington relinquished with a sigh of unutterable humiliation.
Ben moved forward with a quick firm tread, following Harrington, who went before trampling down the undergrowth, and putting aside the drooping branches from his path.
CHAPTER IX.
THE BURNING CEDAR.
The cedar tree stood on a slope of the bank, and had cast its fiery rain over the herbage and brushwood for yards around, leaving them crisped and dry.
Harrington gathered up a quantity of the seared grass, and heaped a dry couch upon which Ben laid his charge within the genial heat that came from the cedar tree. Then they gathered up all the combustible matter within reach, and began to kindle a fire so near to the place where she lay that its heat must help to drive back the chill of death if there was a spark of life yet vital in her bosom.
Harrington knelt beside Mabel. He chafed her hands between his own, and wrung the water from her long hair. But it all seemed in vain. No color came to those blue fingers. The purple tinge still lay like the shadow of violets under the closed eyes,—no motion of the chest—no stir of the limbs. At last drops of water came oozing through the white lips, and a scarcely perceptible shiver ran through the limbs.