“Like enough you’ll be a goodish while alone here, an’ tharfore left to your reflections. Afore partin’ company, let me say somethin’ that may comfort you. Dick Darke’s got your girl; ’bout this time has her in his arms!”
Chapter Seventy Three.
Helpless and hopeless.
“O God!”
Charles Clancy thus calls upon his Maker. Hitherto sustained by indignation, now that the tormentor has left him, the horror of his situation, striking into his soul in all its dread reality, wrings from him the prayerful apostrophe.
A groan follows, as his glance goes searching over the plain. For there is nothing to gladden it. His view commands the half of a circle—a great circle such as surrounds you upon the sea; though not as seen from the deck of a ship, but by one lying along the thwarts of a boat, or afloat upon a raft.
The robbers have ridden out of sight, and he knows they will not return. They have left him to die a lingering death, almost as if entombed alive. Perhaps better he were enclosed in a coffin; for then his sufferings would sooner end.
He has not the slightest hope of being succoured. There is no likelihood of human creature coming that way. It is a sterile waste, without game to tempt the hunter, and though a trail runs across it, Borlasse, with fiendish forethought, has placed him so far from this, that no one travelling along it could possibly see him. He can just descry the lone cottonwood afar off, outlined against the horizon like a ship at sea. It is the only tree in sight; elsewhere not even a bush to break the drear monotony of the desert.