CHAPTER XIX
THE QUEST.
Perhaps Helen might have slept better had she known what was in the wallet, but it would have been difficult. Dr. Wright, accompanied by Douglas, crept silently into the tent just before the camp broke up for the night and found her pulse absolutely normal. His patient was sleeping so peacefully that he sought his hammock thoroughly contented with the treatment he had administered in the first case of snake bite that he had met in his practice.
Dawn was in the neighborhood of four o’clock. It was so still it seemed impossible that thirty persons were camping on that mountain side. The night noises had ceased. Katy-dids and tree-frogs, who had been making as much clatter as though they had been getting out a morning paper, had gone home to rest until it should be time to commence on the next edition.
This lull between night and morning lasted only a few moments and then there was “the earliest pipe of half-awakened birds.” At the first sleepy note, Dr. Wright stirred in the hammock which he had stretched tightly between two giant pines a little way from the camp. He had told himself he was to awake at dawn, and now that he had done it, what was it all about? He lay still for a few moments drowsily drinking in the beauties of the dawn. A mocking bird had constituted himself waker-up of the bird kingdom since he could speak all languages. He now began to call the different bird notes and was sleepily answered from bush and tree. When he felt that a sufficient number was awake to make it worth his while, he burst into a great hymn of praise and thanksgiving; at least that was what it seemed to the young doctor, the only human being awake on that mountain side.
“I’d like to join you, old fellow, I’m so thankful that Helen is safe,” and then he remembered why he had set himself the task of waking at dawn.
He slid from his hammock and in a short while was taking the trail of the day before, back to the Devil’s Gorge. It seemed but a short walk to the athletic young man as he swung his long legs, delighting in the exercise. He reached the gorge in much less than half the time it had taken the hikers of yesterday.
The morning light was clear and luminous but the gorge was as gruesome as ever. Sun light never penetrated its gloom, and Dr. Wright noticed that no birds seemed to sing there. He let himself carefully down the cliff, practicing what he had preached and looking where he stepped. In the exact spot where Helen had jumped, he saw a snake coiled as though waiting for another pretty little gray shoe to come his way.
“It may not be the same snake,” muttered the young man, “but I am going to presume it is and kill him if I can.”
He was standing on the ledge where Helen had been when she called to Lewis Somerville, just before the fatal leap. The wallet was in plain view, caught in a crotch of the scrub oak, and the hateful snake was curled up directly under the tree as though put there by some evil magician to guard a secret treasure.