"Owe me!" I said. "It is to you that we owe our very lives, and our escape from death in mid-ocean."
"Do not speak of it," he said, shaking his head with a sorrowful expression on his face. "You owe me nothing. I would to Heaven it were not so! But we will not talk of that, now. And this is Mrs. Craig," he continued, taking Ruth by the hand,—"the fair lady whose nuptials were celebrated in my house. And Mrs. Lecks, and Mrs. Aleshine." As he spoke he shook hands with each. "How I have longed to meet you! I have thought of you every day since I returned to my island, and discovered that you had been—I wish I could say—my guests. And where is the reverend gentleman? And the three mariners? I hope that nothing has befallen them!"
"Alas!—for three of them at least," ejaculated Mrs. Aleshine; "they have left us, but they are all right. And now, sir, if you could tell us what relation you are to Emily, and what Lucille——"
"Barb'ry!" cried Mrs. Lecks, making a dash towards her friend, "can't you give the man a minute to breathe? Don't you see he's so dumflustered that he hardly knows who he is himself! If them two women was to sink down dead with hunger and hard slidin' right afore your very eyes while you was askin' what relation they was to each other and to him, it would no more 'n serve you right! We'd better be seein' if anythin' 's the matter with 'em, and what we can do for 'em."
At this moment the younger of Mr. Dusante's ladies quickly stepped forward. "O Mrs. Craig, Mrs. Lecks, and Mrs. Aleshine!" she exclaimed, "I'm just dying to know all about you!"
"And which, contrariwise," cried Mrs. Aleshine, "is the same with us, exactly."
"And of all places in the world," continued the young lady, "that we should meet here!"
No one could have been more desirous than I was to know all about these Dusantes, and to discuss the strange manner of our meeting, but I saw that Ruth was looking very pale and faint, and that the elder Dusante lady had sat down again upon the ground, as though obliged to do so by sheer exhaustion, and I therefore hailed with a double delight the interruption of further explanations by the appearance of two men on horseback who came galloping towards us.
They belonged to the house which I had noticed from the road above, and one of them had seen our swift descent down the mountain-side. At first he had thought the black object he saw sliding over the snow slopes was a rock or mass of underbrush, but his keen eye soon told him that it was a group of human beings, and summoning a companion, he had set out for the foot of the mountain as soon as horses could be caught and saddled.
The men were much surprised when they heard the details of our adventure, but as it was quite plain that some members of our party needed immediate nourishment and attention, the questions and explanations were made very short. The men dismounted from their horses, and the elder Dusante lady was placed upon one of them, one man leading the animal and the other supporting the lady. Ruth mounted the other horse, and I walked by her to assist her in keeping her seat, but she held fast to the high pommel of the saddle and got on very well. Mr. Dusante took his younger companion on one arm, and his package under the other, while Mrs. Lecks, having relieved her foot from the encircling bonnet, and Mrs. Aleshine, now free from the entangling shawls, followed in the rear. The men offered to come back with the horses for them if they would wait; but the two women declared that they were quite able to walk, and intended to do no waiting, and they trudged vigorously after us. The sun was now high, and the air down here was quite different from that of the mountain-side, being pleasant and almost warm. The men said that the snows above would probably soon melt, as it was much too early in the season for snow to lie long on these lower sides of the mountains.