In fact, after listening some time, and hearing nothing, the uncomfortable sensation increased, and he began to back away, when the sound was again heard—a harsh, wild, but very subdued cry from quite a different direction, thrilling the lad’s nerves, and making him turn hastily to flee from the dark precincts.
For it was like no other sound which he had ever heard. No animal or bird could cry like that. The hedgehog, if shut up in a pit, would sometimes utter a wild strange noise, which, heard in the darkness, was startling as the shriek or hoot of an owl. But it was none of these, and giving way for the moment to ignorant superstition, Fred began to get out of the wilderness as fast as he could, till he stumbled over a briar stretched right across his way, fell heavily, and as he struggled up again, he heard the cry repeated.
“Oh, how I wish some one was here to knock me over!” he muttered angrily. “What a miserable coward I am!”
And now, fully convinced that some unhappy wounded man had crawled into the thicket to die, he went sharply back to where he had seemed nearest to the sound, and began to search once more.
It was for some time in vain, and probably he would have had to give up what seemed to be a hopeless task, had he not suddenly seen a bramble strand feebly thrust aside, and the point of a rusty sword directed toward him.
He drew his own weapon, and beat the rusty blade away, hacking through a few bramble strands, and there, deep down in a tunnel of strands and boughs, was the ghastly blood-besmeared countenance of a man, with hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, and a look of weakness that strongly resembled that which, to his sorrow, he had so often seen upon the field of battle.
The wretched man seemed to make an effort to raise his rusty sword again, but it fell from his grasp, and he lay staring wildly at his finder.
“Who are you? How came you here?” began Fred, involuntarily, though he felt that he knew; and then, with a cry of surprise and horror, he dropped upon his knees beside the wounded man. “Nat, my poor fellow,” he cried, “is it you?”
The man looked at him wildly for a few moments, as if he were dreaming, before the light of recognition came into his sunken eyes.
“Master Fred!” he whispered. “You? That’s right. Put me out of my misery at once.”