Fortunately they had thought to bring a can with them in their hurried escape from the ranch, and Hammond stole out every night and filled it from the river not two hundred yards away. De Rivas’ wounded leg entirely incapacitated him from doing anything; Hammond had been obliged to carry him more than half the way on the night of their flight.
“Three days!” de Rivas was thinking to himself. “He can never do it even if he had boots!”
Three days was too short a time in which to walk to Salisbury and bring back help. Three days was only long when contemplated from the point of view of a man whose larder is empty, and whose death lurks in the shadows.
“What am I going to give her to eat?”
“I’ve thought of that too,” said Hammond quietly. The other man looked up questioningly. The problem of provisions had been a haunting one ever since they arrived in their refuge. If Hammond had a solution to it now, why not before? But Hammond was apparently not inclined to be communicative. He merely sat there staring at Boston; and Boston as though suddenly aware of something personal in his master’s attention rose suddenly, and in his silent, floundering way came over and laid his nose on Hammond’s knee. Hammond after a moment or so raised the dog’s head in his hands and looked into the golden brown eyes, tender and trustful as a woman’s, far more trustworthy than many women’s. Then, for Maryon Hammond, he did a strange thing; he bent his head and kissed his dog’s nose. De Rivas bit suddenly on the thorn between his lips, and looked away. He had seen Hammond’s eyes, and it is not good to see the eyes of a strong man in pain. He knew now what Hammond meant to do to keep him and his wife alive during the next three days.
When Cara de Rivas awoke from her long sleep of exhaustion it was dusk, and she found herself alone with her husband in the dell. She crept to his side and kissed him with a whispered inquiry for the pain of his wound. Then:
“Where is Maryon?”
Unfalteringly, without the flicker of an eyelid, de Rivas repeated the lesson in which Hammond had instructed him.
“He has gone to get water—and Cara,—he has had a great stroke of luck—got a buck in a kind of primitive trap he fixed up last night. We shall have meat for several days.”
“Meat—but no fire!” she said, a little spasm of horror contracting her weary face. He put his arm round her.