“Well done, partner! You fought gamely, and if you had eaten another bear we should never have landed you.”
Harry, I think, had been at one time a trout fisher. Ormond, however, after making an effort to rise, lay limply in the snow.
“I’m very sorry to trouble you, but I can’t get up,” he said. “Something gone wrong internally and my leg’s broken. I’m much afraid you will have to carry me.”
It was an arduous undertaking, and even before starting it was necessary to lash his limbs together with a rifle between them by way of splint. After this we spent two hours traversing the next mile or so, and my shoulders ached when with intense satisfaction we found firm earth beneath our feet once more. Ormond was distinctly heavy, and that region is sufficiently difficult to traverse even by a wholly unburdened man, while, hampered by his weight, the two days’ march to the crossing might be lengthened indefinitely. Still, we could not leave him there, and, framing two spruce poles with branches between them into a litter, we struggled forward under our burden. We were five partly fed and worn-out men in all, and we carried the litter alternately by twos and fours, finding the task a trying one either way. Probably we could never have accomplished it except under pressure of necessity.
The bronze already had faded in the sufferer’s face, his cheeks had fallen in, but though the jolting must have caused him severe pain at times he rarely complained. Instead, he would smile at us encouragingly, or make some pitiful attempt at a jest, and I think it was chiefly to please us that he choked down a few spoonfuls of the very untempting 276 stew we forced on him. Once, too, when I tried to feed him his eyes twinkled, though his lips were blanched, as he said:
“We are playing out our parts in a most unconventional fashion. Ralph Lorimer, are you sure that it is not poison you are giving me?”
Perhaps he would have said more if I had followed his lead, but I did not do so, and these two veiled references were all that passed between us on the subject that most concerned us until almost the end. It was late one night, but there was a beaten trail beneath us and we knew we were running a race for Ormond’s life, when at last a glimmer of light appeared among the trunks and the sound of hurrying water increased in volume. We quickened our dragging pace, and when Harry pounded violently on the door of a log building an old man with bent shoulders and long white hair stood before us.
“Ye’ll come in, and very welcome,” he said. “I heard ye coming down the trail. Four men with a load between them—where are the lave o’ ye? The best that’s in Hector’s shanty is waiting ye.”
There was an air of dignity about him which struck me, and I had heard prospectors and surveyors talk about mad Hector of the crossing. When we carried our burden in he knelt and laid back Ormond’s under jacket of deerskin before he saw to the broken leg with a dexterity that evinced a knowledge of elementary surgery.
“Is this going to be the end of me?” asked Ormond languidly, and the old man, turning his head, glanced toward me in warning as he answered: “That’s as the Lord wills. Yere friends will need to be careful. The leg’s no set that ill, but I’m suspecting trouble inside o’ ye. With good guidance ye should get over it. Lay him gently yonder while I slip on a better lashing.” 277