Then I remembered hearing the crack of a rifle, and knew that the Wild Mountain Man had saved our lives. I tried to rise but found my ankle so badly sprained that I could not stand on it.
Suddenly a low voice with a hint of an Irish accent said, “Sit down, stranger, while I look to your mate,” and I saw the tall lithe figure of a man clothed in buckskin bending over Pete.
“Only stunned, friend,” said he, and I heard no more. The blow on my head, combined with the pain from my ankle was too much for me, and now that the danger was over it was a good time to faint, and I took advantage of it.
How long I remained unconscious I do not know, but when my eyes opened again it was night; through the interlacing boughs overhead the stars were shining brightly, my head was neatly bandaged and so was my foot and ankle. I could hear our horses cropping grass near by. I raised my head and there lay Pete; he was alive I knew by his snores that issued from his nose, and we were in our own camp; but—what are those animals by our camp fire? Wolves! gaunt, shaggy wolves!
I hastily arose to a sitting posture, but my alarm subsided when in the dim light of the fire I could trace the outline of another man’s figure, and on a stick close to the stranger’s head roosted a giant bird.
Could it be that this wild man of the mountain—possibly my own father—was camping with us?
CHAPTER V
“Moseyed, by gum! I’ll be tarnally tarnashuned if that terri-fa-ca-cious spook hain’t pulled out!” was the exclamation that awakened me the morning after our adventure with the bear.
Lazily opening my eyes I gazed a moment at the sun just peeping over the mountain, then closed them again; but when I attempted to change my position a sharp pain in my ankle thoroughly awakened me. Still I lay quiet because it was some time before I could collect my scattered senses and separate in my mind the real incident and the dream phantasms.
The pain in my ankle, the swelled and irritated condition of my nose plainly proved to me that there was no dream about my injuries, but I discovered that my head and leg were neatly bandaged with strips of fine linen. I sat for a while busily collecting the incidents of the past twenty-four hours, arranging them in my mind in their proper order and place. I cut out the dream portion from the realities with very little trouble until I reached the part where I had awakened in the night and had seen the wolves, the eagle and the Wild Hunter. I could not be sure whether that was a dream or reality. Had I seen this strange old man with his eagle and his wolf pack beside our camp fire or had I dreamed it? Had this hobgoblin man, who might be my own father, rescued me from death at the claws of the grizzly and bound my wounds for me, or was that but a dream too? Had not Big Pete saved me perhaps and cared for me afterward?