In the Valley

by Harold Frederic

"Why not carry him in this canoe?" I asked. "It is lighter than any litter we could make."

The trapper slapped his lank, leather-clad thigh in high approval. "By hokey!" he said, "you've hit it!"

We sat on the mossy bank, on either side of the insensible Philip, and ate the last remaining fragments of our store of food. Another day of this and we should have been forced to shoot something, and light a fire to cook it over, no matter what the danger. Enoch had, indeed, favored this course two days before, but I clung to my notion of keeping Cross's presence in the Valley an absolute secret. His life would have been in deadly peril hereabouts, even before the battle. How bitterly the hatred of him and his traitor-fellows must have been augmented by the slaughter of that cruel ambuscade, I could readily imagine. With what words could I have protected him against the righteous rage of a Snell, for example, or a Seeber, or any one of a hundred others who had left kinsmen behind in that fatal gulch? No! There must be no risk run by meeting any one.

With the scanty meal finished our rest was at an end. We ought to lose no time. Each minute's delay in getting the wounded man under a roof, in bed, within reach of aid and nursing, might be fatal.

It was no light task to get the canoe upon our shoulders, after we had put in it our guns, covered these with ferns and twigs, and upon these laid Philip's bulky form, and a very few moments' progress showed that the work before us was to be no child's play. The conformation of the canoe made it a rather awkward thing to carry, to begin with. To bear it right side up, laden as it was, over eight miles of almost continuous ascent, through a perfectly unbroken wilderness, was as laborious an undertaking as it is easy to conceive.

We toiled along so slowly, and the wretched little brook, whose bed we strove to follow, described such a wandering course, and was so often rendered fairly impassable by rocks, driftwood, and overhanging thicket, that when the sun hung due south above us we had covered barely half our journey, and confronted still the hardest portion of it. We were so exhausted when this noon hour came, too, that I could make no objection when Enoch declared his purpose of getting some trout from the brook, and cooking them. Besides, we were far enough away from the river highway and from all habitations now to render the thing practically safe. Accordingly I lighted a small fire of the driest wood to be found, while the trapper stole up and down the brook, moving with infinite stealth and dexterity, tracking down fish and catching them with his hands under the stones.

Soon he had enough for a meal--and, my word! it was a feast for emperors or angels. We stuffed the pink dainties with mint, and baked them in balls of clay. It seemed as if I had not eaten before in years.

We tried to rouse Cross sufficiently to enable him to eat, and in a small way succeeded; but the effect upon him was scarcely beneficial, it appeared to us. His fever increased, and when we started out once more under our burden, the motion inseparable from our progress affected his head, and he began to talk incoherently to himself.

Nothing can be imagined more weird and startling than was the sound of this voice above us, when we first heard it. Both Enoch and I instinctively stopped. For the moment we could not tell whence the sound came, and I know not what wild notions about it flashed through my mind. Even when we realized that it was the fever-loosed tongue of our companion which spoke, the effect was scarcely less uncanny. Though I could not see him, the noise of his ceaseless talking came from a point close to my head; he spoke for the most part in a bold, high voice--unnaturally raised above the pitch of his recent faint waking utterances. Whenever a fallen log or jutting bowlder gave us a chance to rest our load without the prospect of too much work in hoisting it again, we would set the canoe down, and that moment his lips would close. There seemed to be some occult connection between the motion of our walking and the activity of his disordered brain.

For a long time--of course in a very disconnected way--he babbled about his mother, and of people, presumably English, of whom I knew nothing, save that one name, Digby, was that of his elder brother Then there began to be interwoven with this talk stray mention of Daisy's name, and soon the whole discourse was of her.