“Besides,” he said to himself, with a bitter smile playing upon his lips, “if they do make us out they may not trouble, for they will think we are dead.”
He lay still then, waiting for Punch to awaken so that he could warn him to lie perfectly quiet.
The hours glided by, with the sun rising higher and setting the watcher thinking, in spite of his misery, weariness, and the pangs of hunger that attacked him, of what a wonderfully beautiful contrast there was between the night and the day. With nothing else that he could do, he recalled the horrors of the past hours, the alternating chills of cold and despair, and the howlings of the wolves; and he uttered more than one sigh of relief as his eyes swept the peaks away across the valley, which here and there sent forth flashes of light from a few scattered patches of melting snow, the beautiful violet shadows of the transverse gullies through which sparkling rivulets descended with many a fall to join the main stream, which dashed onward with the dull, musical roar which rose and fell, now quite loud, then almost dying completely away. The valley formed a very paradise to the unfortunate fugitive, and he muttered bitterly:
“How beautiful it would have been under other circumstances, when such a wondrous scene of peace was not disfigured by war! So bitterly cold last night,” thought the young private impatiently, for he was fighting now against two assaults, both of which came upon him when he was trying hard to lie perfectly still and maintain his equanimity while the pangs of hunger and thirst were growing poignant. “It seems so easy,” he muttered, “to lie still and keep silence, and here I am feeling that I must move and do something, and wanting so horribly to talk. It would be better if that poor boy would only awaken and speak to me. And there’s that water, too,” he continued, as the faint plashing, rippling sound rose to his ears from below. “Oh, how I could drink! I wish the wind would rise, so that I couldn’t hear that dull plashing sound. How terribly hot the sun is; and it’s getting worse!”
Then a horrible thought struck him, that Punch might suddenly wake up and begin to talk aloud, feverish and delirious from his sufferings; and then when Pen’s troubles were at their very worst, and he could hardly contain himself and keep from creeping downwards to the water’s edge, it seemed as if a cloud swept over him, and all was blank, for how long he could not tell, but his fingers closed sharply to clutch the twigs and grass amongst which he lay as he started into full consciousness.
“Why, I have been asleep!” he muttered. “I must have been;” and he stared wildly around. There was a great shadow there, and now the sun is beating down upon that little gully and lighting up the flashing waters of the fall. “Why, I must have been sleeping for hours, and it must be quite midday.”
His eyes now sought the positions of the different vedettes, and all was so brilliant and clear that he saw where the men had stood up their muskets against bush or tree, noted the flash from bayonets and the duller gleam from musket-barrels. In one case, too, the men were sheltering themselves beneath a tree, and this sent an additional pang of suffering through the lad, as he felt for the first time that the sun was playing with burning force upon his neck.
“It’s of no use,” he said. “Even if they see me, I must move.”
But he made the movement with the mental excuse that it was to see how his wounded companion fared.
It only meant seizing hold of a clump of wiry heather twice over and drawing himself to where his face was close to the sleeper. Then he resigned himself again with a sigh to try and bear his position.