"I do not know!" cried I. "I cannot tell you!"
"Then you can just lie there!" snapped one of the four, and went back to his place of outlook on the ledge. And the other, who had been watching the valley, came and stood by my shoulder, irritating the snake, by his presence, to fresh efforts.
"You 're a fool," he said. "Your partners have deserted you. They 're off. There ain't hide nor hair to be seen of them. If they 'd leave you in a lurch like this, you 're a fool not to let us know the location. We 'll follow 'em up again and take vengeance on 'em for you—see?"
And just then, as though to refute his remarks as to the heedlessness of my partners, I heard a faint snap of a rifle, and the man with the squint, who had taken his turn on guard at the place this fellow had vacated, turned round and said he: "Boys, O boys, I 'm hit!"
Something in the tone of his voice made me glance at him sharply, but with half an eye for the snake, as you may be sure, and my ears alert for its warning rattle. I was never more alert in my life than then, and, strange though it may seem, the predominating thought in my mind was, "How sad, how very sad to leave this world, never to see the rich, rich blue of that sky again!"
But, as I say, the tone of the man's voice breaking in on my thoughts and terrors was peculiar, and, with my head still as low in my shoulders as I could manage to hold it, I laid my cheek to the hot sand and looked at him. He had turned to the man who had been standing by me, but at sound of the shot had dropped to his knees.
"Does it look bad?" said he, drawing his finger across his forehead, where was a tiny mark, and then holding out his hand and looking on it for traces of blood, raising up his face for inspection by the man beside me at the same time, and a question in his eyes, very much as you have seen a child, "Is my face clean, mother?" Yes, and with a very childish voice, too.
"It don't look bad," was the reply—and neither it did.
But when he turned away again to the other sentry who lay further off, repeating his question to him in that simple voice, I saw the back of his head. And his brains were dribbling out behind upon his neck. A terrible weakness filled my heart. I heard him say, with no oath, as one might have expected, but in a soft voice: "Dear me!" and again, "Dear me! How very dark it is getting!"
Which was an awful word to hear with the sun blazing right in his eyes out of the burnished, palpitating sky. And then he put it as a question and still with the note of astonishment: "Dear me, isn't that strange? Is n't it getting very——" and he sank forward on his face; but what followed I do not know. In the terror of my own position I kept all my faculties alert; but at the sight of that man's back and the bloody wound, and at the childish voice of him, the world seemed to wheel. A sickness came on me and I fainted away.