The guide pushed forward without a pause.
“Zep! He is worth a thousand dead men!” cried bluff Hal Westcott. “He is sitting up.”
He was reading her blessed letter of recall. He was thin as a shadow, white with suffering and hunger, too, for he had been parched and dried up with fever, and had not touched food for days.
“But I am better,” he said. “I will live now. I did not care to live till this came.”
And he kissed the letter, while tears ran down his thin, wasted face.
The two strong men literally wept over him, while they hurried to make weak broth and boil some rice and water for his drink.
Two days—their mules resting and feeding in the glade below—they tended and nursed him, and watched over him with such care as few suffering men ever got in a bleak place like that.
Then, handling him almost as they would have done an infant, they got him down to the other camp; and they took the gold and his arms and packed them down also, so as to be ready to start for the outside world on the third day.
It would be a long, perhaps a dry story to tell in detail were I to describe that journey out. It had taken W—— and his guide but a day and a half to come in. Yet it was four days after their start when poor Porchet was laid upon a nice cool bed in Belle Vista Cottage, as Mr. Morrison called his home.
And within an hour after, Mr. W—— telegraphed to Miss Hattie Butler: