XVI
NATALIE WOUNDED
The frightened horses struggled over the watercourse, and gained the trees before Garth, hampered as he was, succeeded in drawing their heads together, and stopping them. Slipping out of the saddle without loosening his grasp of Natalie, he lifted her off, ever careful to shield her from possible further shots with his own body. He remembered Mabyn's was a single-shot weapon; and he counted on the time it would take the Indian woman to obtain ammunition, and reload. Quickly and tenderly laying Natalie on the ground under shelter of a stump, he unslung his own rifle. But as he dropped to his knee, and raised it, he saw the woman on the edge of the cut-bank swing the stock of her gun around her head, and send the weapon spinning out over the water. Meanwhile Mabyn was running up the hill toward her with significant action. No immediate further danger threatened. Garth put the pair out of his mind, and bent over Natalie. What happened to the woman at Mabyn's hands was a matter of indifference to him now.
Natalie's left arm hung useless; and a soaking crimson stain spread broadly on her sleeve between elbow and shoulder. Her face had gone chalky white, her eyes were half closed, and her teeth were set painfully in her blue nether lip. To see his sparkling, vivid Natalie brought so low, was a sight to open all the doors of Garth's brain to madness. His heart swelled suffocatingly with rage and grief, but there was no time for that, when every faculty he possessed must be concentrated on saving her; and forcing it back, he picked her up again with infinite tenderness. His first and instinctive thought was to return and seize the hut; so that he might at least have a roof to cover her. He suspected the other two were now without arms; but even if they had a weapon, he had a better one; was a sure shot; and was on his guard.
At the first move he made in the direction of the hut, Natalie, whom he had thought unconscious, divined his intention.
"Garth! Not in his house!" she murmured feverishly. "I will not go in there! I will not!"
He paused in a painful perplexity. "But dearest, there is no other house," he said.
"Put me down in the open air," she begged. "It would suffocate me! I will not endure it!"