Dominique marched very gently, supporting with a firm hand the wounded man seated in his saddle, watching over him as a mother watches over her child, having only one desire—that of reaching the rancho as soon as possible, in order to give this stranger, who, without him, would have died so miserably, that attention which the precarious state in which he still was, necessitated.
In spite of the impatience he felt, it was unfortunately impossible to hurry his horse on for fear of an accident across the broken and almost impracticable roads he was compelled to follow: hence it was with an indescribable feeling of pleasure that, in coming within two or three gunshots of the rancho, he noticed some persons running towards him. Though he did not recognize them at first, his joy was great, for it was help arriving for him; and though he would assuredly have been unwilling to allow it, he recognized its extreme necessity for himself, and especially for the wounded man, as for some hours he had been stumbling along tracks nearly always impracticable, constrained to keep a constant watch on this man, whom, by an incomprehensible miracle, he had saved from a certain death, and whom the slightest neglect might kill.
When the men running towards him were only a few yards from him, he stopped and shouted to them with a joyous air, like a man delighted to be freed from an oppressive responsibility.
"Eh! Come on! Caray! You ought to have been here long ago."
"What do you mean, Dominique?" the adventurer asked in French. "What pressing need did you feel for us?"
"Why, that is plain enough, I fancy. Don't you see that I am bringing a wounded man?"
"A wounded man!" Oliver started with a tiger's bound, which brought him up to the young man's side. "To what wounded man are you alluding?"
"Hang it! To the one I have seated to the best of my ability on my horse, and whom I should not be sorry to see in a good bed; of which, between ourselves, he has the greatest need: for if he be still alive, it is, on my soul, through some incomprehensible miracle of providence!"
The adventurer, without replying, roughly pulled away the sarape thrown over the wounded man's face, and examined it for some minutes with an expression of agony, grief, anger and regret, impossible to describe. His face, which had suddenly turned pale, assumed a cadaverous hue; a convulsive tremour ran over his whole body; his eyes, fixed on the wounded man, seemed to emit flashes, and had a strange expression.
"Oh!" he muttered in a low voice, convulsed by the storm that agitated his heart; "That man! It is he—really he! And is not dead!"