“It’s a bad wound, Nat, but he’ll get over it. That must have been your shot.”
“Why not yours?” I said. “I couldn’t shoot with that arrow through me.”
“But you did, for it was done with the big swan pellets, and I had nothing but dust shot in my gun, for the little birds.”
“Oh!” I cried wonderingly.
“Ah, that’s why you made that poor fellow cry.”
As I lay and thought afterwards I was to my dissatisfaction convinced that mine had been the hand which fired the shot, and the knowledge of this somehow made me feel a kind of sympathy for the savage who lay there far more badly wounded than I, while the carpenter and my uncle, with Pete’s help, built up a kind of semi-circular hedge as a defence around us.
“We can’t begin our retreat with you in that condition, Nat,” my uncle said, “and I don’t like to be driven away by a little party of ruffians like these.”
“I could walk,” I said.
“I know that,” he replied curtly; “walk yourself into a state, of fever, and make your wound go bad. Look at that fellow; Nature teaches him what to do—lie still—curl up like an animal, till his injury heals. What are you thinking about?”
“That poor fellow’s wound.”