Strong arms raised him up and carried him tenderly along the beach as one might have carried a child. Anxious eyes peered down at the placid face; voices, subdued and solicitous, murmured around him. Near at hand, the river fretted against its shores, its gurgling song more melancholy than the plaintive dirge of the pines.
Wading ashore, following his last encounter with the outlaws, Dick had collapsed, and, when found later by the rescue party, lay with his feet in the water and his arms flung out above his head. At first, they had believed him dead. No senseless, inanimate thing cast up by the sea, ever presented a more bedraggled appearance. The stubborn spark of life, which still glowed feebly within him, was not manifest. Corporal Rand, who had elected to carry him back to the shelter of trees, where Toma had already kindled a fire, could have sworn that his young friend had fought his last fight.
The sound of firing had carried to the inlet, and had been the cause of much concern and conjecture on the part of Dick’s companions. Both surmised that the youthful adventurer was in trouble and they had come expecting to find him in some tight corner, hotly besieged, yet valiantly holding his own. They were wholly unprepared and not a little mystified, when after a painstaking search, they finally stumbled upon his body.
Neither could explain how Dick had come there nor exactly what had happened to him. The nearest approach to a reasonable solution was that Dick in some unaccountable manner had been knocked unconscious and then thrown into the water—left there by the outlaws to drown. The cold plunge had partly revived him and he had contrived somehow to swim or crawl ashore.
“I doubt if he’ll live,” Rand’s voice was sepulchral.
For hours they employed restorative measures. Toma went back to the warehouse to fetch a blanket. They chafed his limbs; built up a huge bonfire; worked desperately over him. Just before morning Dick lay in a comatose state, his pulse more steady, his condition considerably improved. Faint color began to tinge his cheeks. After a time, his eyes opened dazedly and with much wrinkling and puckering of his brow he endeavored to fill in his gaps of memory.
Wraiths and shadows of once familiar things drifted across his mental vision. Through the darkness and obscurity of his mind, not in orderly sequence, but in a provoking, mysterious fashion, there flashed haphazardly half-familiar scenes of the past.
Toma, stooping to smooth back the rumpled hair, glanced sombrely at the policeman opposite.
“You think him better?” he demanded in a strained, cracked voice.
“Much better,” answered the corporal.