At this one of the men springs towards him; whether to be kind, or to kill, he cannot tell. For before a hand is laid on him the strange tableau fades from his sight; and death, with all its dark obliviousness, seems to take possession of his soul.
Chapter Twenty Five.
“Saved by an Angel!”
The shadow of Walt Wilder is again projected over the Staked Plain, as before, to a gigantic length. But this time westwardly, from a sun that is rising instead of setting.
It is the morning after he parted with his disabled companion; and he is now making back towards the spot where he had left the latter, the sun’s disc just appearing above the horizon, and shining straight upon his back. Its rays illumine an object not seen before, which lends to Walt’s shadow a shape weird and fantastic. It is that of a giant, with something sticking out on each side of his head that resembles a pair of horns, or as if his neck was embraced by an ox-yoke, the tines tending diagonally outwards.
On looking at Walt himself the singularity is at once understood. The carcase of a deer lies transversely across his back, the legs of the animal being fastened together so as to form a sling, through which he has thrust his head, leaving the long slender shanks, like the ends of the letter X, projecting at each side and high above his shoulders.
Despite the load thus borne by him, the step of the ex-Ranger is no longer that of a man either despairing or fatigued. On the contrary, it is light and elastic; while his countenance shows bright and joyous as the beams of the ascending sun. His very shadow seems to flit over the frosted foliage of the artemisias as lightly as the figure of a gossamer-robed belle gliding across the waxed floor of a ball-room.
Walt Wilder no longer hungers or thirsts. Though the carcase on his back is still unskinned, a huge collop cut out of one of its hind-quarters tells how he has satisfied the first craving; while the gurgle of water, heard inside the canteen slung under his arm, proclaims that the second has also been appeased.