Approaching the pallet, Polaris took the man who lay there by the shoulders and turned him over, placing his head back on its pillow. He started with surprise when, despite the emaciation of sickness and a ten days' growth of beard, he recognized the well-remembered features of the Sardanian king.
"You, too, Minos?" he exclaimed. "Truly, the ways of fate are strange."
A touch of the hand told him that the heart of the king still beat. He glanced around the room. The fireplace, with its dead ashes, told its story. For the first time he realized the cold of the place.
"A wound, sickness, the loss of fire, and no means to make one, then the beast. I find you in evil case, indeed, Minos the king," he said.
He hurried to the fireplace and piled wood upon the hearth. With his keen knife he hacked splinters and set them to the wood. Producing a box of matches from the breast of his shirt, he struck them and fired the pile in many places. Going back to the king, he exerted his great strength, and dragged the couch across the rocky floor to the side of the fireplace. He spread a rug on the floor and laid the girl on it. She showed no sign as yet of returning consciousness.
While he was at work, he heard the voice of Zenas Wright calling him insistently from the hill slopes outside the cave, where he had left him to mind the dog team.
Polaris hastened out, and met the old man in the passage.
"I was getting worried," the scientist said. "I've unhitched those wicked brutes of yours and given them something to chew on. They'd have taken a chance at me if I hadn't, I guess. What's in there?"
In a few words Polaris told him what he had found, the old geologist tugging at his white beard and punctuating the tale with many an exclamation of surprise.
"Now haste you within, old man, with that flask of yours," said Polaris, "and see if the man may be saved. The girl, I think, is sound and well—she has only fainted—but Minos the king has been sorely wounded, and lies so ill that his bones almost show through his flesh."