Then suddenly the voice broke out afresh quite close and Canlan turned his head stiffly again and I also looked up whence the voice came—and there was the face of Larry Donoghue looking down on us from the rib of rocky hill under whose shelter we sat. There was a trickle of blood, or a scar—it was doubtful which—from his temple down his long, spare jaw to the corner of the loose mouth; the eyes stared down on us like the eyes of a dead man, blank and wide.
He stretched out his arms and gripped in the declivity of the hill with his fingers, crooked like talons, and pulled himself forward; but at that tug he lost his balance, lying on his belly as he was, and came down the slope, sliding on his face, the kerchief still about his head as I had seen him when I thought he had breathed his last.
In Canlan's mind there was no question but that this was Larry Donoghue's wraith. He tried to cry out and could not, gave one gulping gasp in his throat, and when Donoghue slid down the bank, as I have described, Canlan leapt to his feet and ran for it—ran without any intelligence, straight before him.
I have told you that the next rib of rock broke off sheer and went down in a declivity. Thither Canlan's terror took him; and the last I saw of him was his legs straddled in the run, out in mid-air, as though to take another stride; and then down he went. But it was to Donoghue I turned and strove to raise him. For one fleeting moment he seemed to know me; our eyes met and then the light of recognition passed out of his and he sank back. It was a dead man I held in my arms, and though I had never greatly cared for him, that last glance of his eye was so full of yearning, so pathetic, so helpless that I felt a lump in my throat and a thickness at my heart and as I laid him back again I burst into a flood of tears that shook my whole frame.
A strange, gusty sound in my ear and the feeling of a hot vapour on my neck brought me suddenly round in, if not fear, something akin to it. But I think absolute fear was pretty well a thing I should never know again after these occurrences.
It was Canlan's horse standing over me snuffing me; and when I raised my head he gave a quiet whinny and muzzled his white nose to me. Perhaps in his mute heart the horse knew that these sounds of mine bespoke suffering, and truly these pack-horses draw very close to men, in the hills.
But though the horse brought me back in a way to manliness and calm it was a miserable night that I spent there. I sat up and with my chin in my hands remained gazing vacantly eastwards until the morning broke in my eyes. And behind me stood the horse thus till morning, ever and again touching my shoulder with his wet nose, his warm breath puffing on my cheek.
I was thankful, indeed, more than I can tell you, for that companionship. And now and then I put up my hand and when I did so the beast's head would come gently down for me to clap his nose, and doing so I felt myself not altogether alone and friendless on that hill of terror and of death.
CHAPTER XX
Compensation