For a little time it was difficult for him to keep from screaming with the pain.
As soon as he felt a little better, he took off his boot and stocking, and carefully examined the injured foot, muttering meanwhile between his groans: “Oh, I hope the demon didn’t hear that noise! How the stones rattled and thundered! If he heard, he will come rushing out to attack me, and I am not able to help myself a bit! Oh, what a catastrophe this is!”
Poor Henry! That time-honored accident, which, in romance, befalls all heroes of the chase, had befallen him. “He had sprained his ankle!”
Only, in this instance, no lovely huntress was to find him, and have him tenderly conveyed to her dwelling. No sporting companions were with him, hastily to construct a litter, and smuggle him into the castle of some incarcerated maiden, whom, making light of his suffering, he would release from her “turret prison;” and then, drawing the wicked jailer—her scheming, hunch-backed uncle—out of his concealment, he would fall upon him, and slay him, without mercy.
No; no love-marriage was fated to result from that adventure; Henry was to lie there all alone; and suffer.
It was sad, but our hero bore it patiently and philosophically. He believed that he should not be molested by the demon, and that was some consolation. But Will? Alas! All hope of rescuing him, so far as Henry was concerned, was at an end. That grieved him more than anything else.
Slowly the time wore away. As the demon did not come out again, Henry thought that the noise made by the falling stones had not been heard in the cave. He was full of anxious and remorseful thoughts for himself as well as for his cousin; and, much as he revolved the affair in his mind, he could hit upon no feasible plan of deliverance.
“If I had only told our folk where we were going,” he reflected, “they would hunt for us when they find us missing. But now they will be uneasy, and not know where on earth we are! No; they won’t have the slightest clue to track us! Oh, dear! What is going to become of us? How is this spree to end? What about my ankle? What on earth! Well, now are we to stay here all night? Will in the cave, and I here? ‘So near, and yet so far!’ My stars! I’ve read that in stories, but I never guessed what it meant! ‘So near, and yet so far!’ The man that wrote those words knew more than I ever shall, anyway! Oh! What will the demon do to poor Will?”
Henry could reason logically, and now, as well as his aching ankle would permit, he reviewed the whole scheme of visiting the Demon’s Cave. In the light he now had it seemed very foolish, whichever way he looked at it.
“It was a humbug,” he acknowledged to himself; “but after all it is just what all heroes do, and I don’t see why we should not have managed it better.”