"They seemed to be pretty nigh through with their litter-making. They must be about ready to start. You'd better be spry if you want to go along with 'em."
"Did you speak to any one of me? Did you tell them where I was?"
"I ain't quite a fool, young man," said the trapper, with a gaunt sort of smile. "If they'd caught sight of me, I wouldn't have got much chance to explain about myself, let alone you. It kind of occurred to me that strangers found loafing around in the woods wouldn't get much of an opening for polite conversation just now--especially if those strangers were fellows who had come down from Sillinger's camp with letters only a fortnight ago."
All this time Cross had been stretched at my knees, with his eyes closed. He opened them here, at Enoch's last words, and broke into our conversation with a weak, strangely altered voice:
"I know you now--damn you! I couldn't think before. You are the fellow I gave my letters to, there on Buck's Island. I paid you your own price--in hard gold--and now you shoot me in return. You are on the right side now. You make a good rebel."
"Now look here, Mr. Cross," put in Enoch, with just a trace of temper in his tone. "You paid me to carry those letters because I was going that way, and I carried 'em straight. You didn't pay me for anything else, and you couldn't, neither. There ain't been gold enough minted yet to hire me to fight for your King George against Congress. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!"
"Come, Enoch," I here interrupted, "enough of that. The man is suffering. You must not vex him further by words."
"Suffering or not," returned the trapper, "he might keep a civil tongue in his head.--Why, I even did something you didn't pay me for," he went on, scowling down at the prostrate soldier. "I delivered your message here to this man" (indicating me with a gesture of his thumb)--"all that, you know, about cutting out his heart when you met him, and feeding it to a Missisague dog."
Enoch's grim features relaxed into a sardonic smile as he added: "There may be more or less heart-eating round about here presently, but it don't look much as if it would be his, and the dogs that'll do it don't belong to anybody--not even to a Missisague buck."
The wounded man's frame shook under a spasm of shuddering, and he glowered at us both wildly, with a look half-wrath, half-pitiful pleading, which helped me the better to make up my mind.