"We must gather them into camps at once," he said. "The time is all too short in which to make an enemy out of raw levies. We must drill them all winter, and that will be a man's job."
Straightway he threw himself into the task with tireless energy. And he vowed to himself that the men who had dared to sink a United States cruiser should learn a lesson of tears and death, and that he would have a hand in the teaching of the lesson.
Oblivion, like a deep and dreamless sleep, was the portion of Polaris Janess. It seemed that his soul had withdrawn itself to some place of peace to wait until its racked and weary body should once more be fit for tenancy. The wound in his neck closed and healed. Somewhat of color crept back into his cheeks. His body began to thrive, but there was in it seemingly little more of sentient life than in a tree which draws its nourishment from the soil and knows not of days and nights and the cares thereof.
"It is a blood-clot that presses somewhere on the brain," Glorian told his friends, who stood often at his quiet bedside. "'Twill pass away ere long, and he will be whole again."
To the surprise of Zenas and Everson, Glorian and a number of the learned men of the college of Nematzin spoke English almost with the facility of Oleric, from whom, indeed, they had learned it. And this was a great source of delight to the old geologist, who liked to talk and grumble over his labors. And what use is there in grumbling, if there is no one to hear and understand?
Came a day when the curtain lifted from the brain of the sick man, and memory peopled the vacant stage, as once before it had done when he lay ill in the cabin on the ship Felix on his first journey from his home in the wilderness.
Wondering, he lay still with closed lids, as he had a trick of doing when he waked from slumber. He began to reconstruct. The wreck of the Minnetonka passed before him, and then, like a series of pictures, the events which had followed the sinking of the ship; the stranger people; the judgment of the king; the parting from his love; the coming of the red captain in the night and the flight from Adlaz; the fight at the wharves and the farewell of Minos; the great stairway of the Illia—
There the pictures ceased. He could not then, or ever afterward, recall the fight in the river, where he had gone down to aid Oleric and come by his wound.
Into his nostrils was wafted a breath of faint perfume. A cool hand was laid against his cheek. He opened his eyes. The details of a high, arched room he saw; windows of glass at the north, where the sun shone thinly and big flakes of snow were floating slowly down—for winter had come to Ruthar; at his cheek a long, wonderfully shaped, white hand, with tapering, ringless fingers; a slender wrist; beyond it a face. He closed his lids again, with a frown of disbelief. The beauty of that face was such as no mortal ever saw, save in a dream.