“All right, mate,” said the other, for he had no comfort to give.
And then they walked on again in silence till the moon declined before the coming day, the cruel day, which brought the heat and the following crows again. Dawn brought them to a patch of “dead finish,” as the settlers call a dense and thorny scrub with pretty green leaves, through which it is well nigh impossible to force a way even under the most favourable circumstances; and which presented an utterly impassable barrier to men in their condition. They turned aside once more, and Anderson thought to himself that they must indeed have given up hope, to be stopped by an impassable barrier and yet to make no moan. It was surely the very depths of hopelessness when all ways were alike to them. He looked back on their tracks and dismay filled his heart; they were not firm and straight, but wavering and wandering like those of men in the last extremity. He had followed tracks like these before now, and they always led to the same thing. He wondered dully would any one ever follow those tracks. A little further on Helm let go his arm and ran on ahead.
“We’ll never do any good at this rate,” he gasped, “never—never;” and he pulled at the collar of his shirt till he tore it away. “We must have something to drink. We ‘ll die else, and I mean to have a fight for life. There’s the old horse, he can’t stagger a step further; what’s the good of keeping him? Let’s shoot him—and—and—There’s enough blood in him to—to—”
“No, no, man, no. I tell you that’s the beginning of the end—more than the beginning—the end in fact.”
“I don’t care. I can’t stand this;” and before Anderson could stop him, Helm had drawn his pistol and shot the horse in the head.
The poor beast was at his last gasp, and for the last hour Anderson had been meditating the advisibility of leaving him behind, so it was no material loss; his only care now was to prevent his mate from drinking the blood, which, according to the faith of the bushmen, is worse than drinking salt water.
“Poor old beggar,” he said, taking his pistols and cartridges from the saddle, where they had been wrapped among the blankets, “I suppose it was about the kindest thing we could do for him. Come on, mate, we must leave him to the crows now,” and he caught Helm’s arm and would have led him on.
But the other resisted and breaking free ran back, and before he could stop him, had drawn his knife across the horse’s throat and taken a long draught of blood.
Does it sound ghastly? But such things are, and his lips were dry and parched, and his throat so swollen that he could only speak in hoarse whispers, and so great was the temptation that Anderson, looking away at the bare pitiless plain, with the mocking mirage in the distance, felt that he too might as well drink and die; only the thought of the cripple boy who would be alone in the world but for him, made him make one more desperate effort for self-control.
He took the younger man’s arm and dragged him on, skirting slowly round the “dead finish” till at length, late in the afternoon, it gave place to boree. His own senses were clear enough, but Helm was muttering wildly, and he listened with unheeding ears to his babble of home and mother and sweetheart. They could not go far, and soon they forced their way in among the scrub, and though the burning thirst was worse than ever, the shade was grateful. The crows stopped too, and settled on the low trees, turning their evil blue-black heads on one side to get a better view of their prey.