As we rode on toward Greenhurst, my frame began to sink beneath the excitement that nothing human could have supported. My head reeled; the damp branches that swept across my path almost tore me from the saddle. Jupiter too was tired and worn out with the drenching storm. He staggered along the road with his head bent to the ground, ready to drop beneath my insignificant weight. Chaleco saw this, and rode closer to my side just in time to receive me on his arm as I was falling.
Without a word he lifted me to his own horse, and cast Jupiter’s bridle loose.
“Poor old fellow, let him go home,” he said with a laugh; “but as for you and I, Zana, we have more to accomplish yet.”
He held me close with his left arm, grasping the bridle with the same hand. With his right palm upon my forehead, he rode slowly for a while, till the strength came back to my limbs, and a certain vividness of intelligence possessed me again. Then he spoke.
“Hold tight to me, and be strong. We have lost much time that may be important.”
Without waiting for a reply, he put his horse into a sharp canter and sped on, I hardly knew or cared in what direction. At last, he dismounted and placed me upon the ground, asking abruptly if I knew the objects around me. The moon was out just then, and I looked earnestly about. It was the spot where the gipsy tent had been pitched. The spring where I had found Cora, when an infant, flowed softly on in the hollow at a little distance, and before me, where the moonbeams lay like silver upon the wet grass, I saw the meadow which had once been my sole place of refuge.
“You know the place?” said Chaleco; “it was here she died. Wait a little.”
He searched among the ferns that overhung the bank, which I have described as rising abruptly from the spring, and drew forth a pick-axe and spade covered with rust. A fragment of rock lay imbedded in the bank around which mosses and gorse of many years’ growth had crept.
With two or three blows of the pick-axe, he sent this stone crashing down into the water, which rose up in a wild shower all around as it recoiled from the rude mass.
Chaleco shook off the drops like a water-dog, and continued to turn up the earth. Directly he lifted a slab of slate rock, broad, and some inches thick, which certainly could not originally have belonged to the soil in which it lay.