“Better than that we should never have found her,” said Samson, in a broken voice.
“Teddy sure a find her some day. Now fetch a water, and give her drink,” exclaimed the black; and taking up what neither of the others had noticed—the milking-pail that the poor girl must have carried from day to day in her many wanderings—he went off and soon returned with water.
“Keep back, fool!” exclaimed Anderson, as the black pushed up to Mary’s head, and scooping up some water in the hollow of his hand, he made as if to pour it upon her lips.
“No dead,” exclaimed Teddy; “give her drink. Dah!” he ejaculated; for at that moment Anderson gave a cry of joy on seeing a slight quivering in one eyelid, while the thin blue lips parted to emit a sigh, faint as that of the wind above their heads.
They had reached the poor girl in time; but so near had she been to her last breath, that weeks elapsed, during which she lay almost insensible upon the borders of that unknown land to which she had so nearly travelled, before she could be said to be out of danger.
Hers was a simple story—one that she often told in after years to Anderson’s children, as, a happy wife, she sat beneath his prosperous roof—a story of how she had finished milking one cow, and was carrying her pail to the next, when the gliding form of a black in his war-paint attracted her attention. Her first idea was to flee to the hut; but that she soon saw was utterly impossible, for figure after figure appeared between her and safety, and all she could do was to back quietly into the scrub, and then, with the pail she carried catching in the bushes, so that the white milk splashed out from time to time, she fled on hastily—always with the impression that she was being tracked.
How it was she clung to the pail always seemed to her a mystery; but it was her salvation, for, utterly worn out at last, she had fallen on her knees in the dense wood as darkness came on, dreading to move, and now for the first time she remembered the milk, and drank eagerly of the remaining but sadly-diminished supply. The next day she wandered on and on, helplessly lost, ever changing her course, and fleeing in dread from the blacks she felt assured were on her trail. The sour milk gave her life and strength that day and the next, and the next, as she husbanded and eked out the failing drops with water, till the time came when all seemed a feverish dream, wherein she was struggling on through thorny wastes, with the hot sun pouring its fervid beams upon her head.
She knew no more, for her next recollection was of waking in her own old bed at the hut, as from a long and troubled dream, till a glance at her wasted hands, and an attempt to rise, told her that the dream was true.