On the fifth day Jill and I went up stream some little distance through the burnt forest, and Ossian, the dog, found near the bank a guanaco half-roasted. This was indeed a blessing, and we dined more heartily that evening than we had done for a week. We tried fishing, hoping thereby to add to our larder, but were only indifferently successful. Having neither lines nor bait, we were reduced to the plan called “guddling” by Scottish schoolboys, where you wade and catch the trout with your hands.
Affairs grew desperate on the seventh day, not so much for want of food as from the fact that the ground had ceased to burn, and cooled sufficiently to permit one to walk over the ashes.
A combined attack by land and sea was therefore hourly expected by us, all the more so in that the canoes seemed more active than usual, flitting about hither and thither, but apparently paying no heed to us.
“They’re too silent to please me,” said Ritchie; “they’ll be on us to-night as sure as shot.”
On the same afternoon far away out in the Reach we noticed a noble steamer.
Jill and I stood looking at her until she had gone down out of sight on the horizon. We could easily fancy ourselves on board of her. We could see in imagination the orderly, clean white decks, the burnished brass and wood, the sailors and officers in their smart uniforms, the chairs on deck where lounged the passengers reading, talking, and quietly napping, the officer on the bridge and the sturdy seaman at the wheel. It was so sad; and we waiting—to sell our lives as dearly as possible. That is the last consolation of the brave. And Jill and I had promised ourselves so much, at least.
Jill put such a strange question to Ritchie this afternoon, but I knew what the poor lad was thinking about.
“Ritchie,” he said, “do these horrid Indians torture their prisoners if they take any alive?”
“I’ve never heard they did,” was the quiet reply. “And indeed I don’t think they have the sense—drat ’em.”
The time, we thought, wore all too quickly to a close, and almost as soon as the sun went down in the west, up rose the full moon in the east, and then everything—if not as bright as day—was light enough at all events for the work so soon to commence.