I bathed her face with water from the pail and made her limbs lie comfortably.
“I think we had better leave her here till she comes to,” I said. “I don’t want all those men pursuing her.”
“Just as you say,” he answered. He was nonplussed and confused, willing to let me manage matters any way I wanted to. “Suppose you stay down here and watch, and I’ll go up to the door and head them off if they come back. If you want anything, call. I’ll be right near.”
Jasper went up the ladder again, and I sat down beside the prostrate form of Mattie and waited for her return to consciousness.
The round cellar was dark now. Early dusk was stealing the light of the short autumn day, and except for the shaft of strained sunshine that seeped through the trap-door the pit was dark. I opened the doors into the “under,” but only a faint ray filtered in from behind the boat.
“How gloomy it always must have been!” I thought. “If it had not been for that outside door, she would not even have had air. I suppose it was when she was going for water to the spring in the woods that the half-witted child saw her and told people it was the New Captain. That was what she wanted every one to think! She has always counted on that.... She must have gone out of here through the ‘under’ and up the stairs to the secret room every night. But why?”
“I went because I always went,” said Mattie.
Had I been talking aloud or had she answered my unspoken thought? Startled, I looked at the prone figure of the haggard woman in the tattered overalls and saw she had not even opened her eyes but was lying in the same exhausted position in which we had dropped her—that not a muscle moved, except for the faint breathing of her flat chest and her trembling jaw. She was speaking, or trying to speak again, and I leaned over her in the dark to catch every precious word. It was as if I listened to the unrelated utterances of an oracle. No one could tell whether Mattie would recover from this wanton chase or live through her devastating imprisonment. Each syllable, I thought, might be her last, and whatever clue she gave was important.
The house above me, where Jasper sat waiting on the doorstep, was so silent that I thought perhaps he might be able to hear her talking. I took hold of one of Mattie’s claw-like hands and stroked it gently.
“I went—up there,” the fluttering voice repeated, “because I always went. Every night of my life I spent in that room—ever since—it happened.”