Soltké bore the news as he had borne all that went before, with silent, martyr-like patience. He seemed to have guessed it: not a muscle moved, not a feature changed. He listened to it as calmly as he listened to our expressed hope that the district surgeon would turn up by sundown, and with as little personal concern.
Towards evening he spoke a good deal to us all, but in a way that made our hearts sink. He spoke of his home and his past life—for the first time—and of something that was troubling him greatly. He also admitted that his leg was feeling very hot, and that he felt twinges of pain shooting up into the groin and body.
At sundown he asked for his Prayer-Book, and later on, when we had left him alone for a while, and sat in silent, helpless despair by the neglected fire, he asked for Robbie. At last, at about ten o’clock that night, we heard the welcome sound of a horse’s trotting, and to our unspeakable delight the cheery little doctor turned up. Poor old Soltké did brighten up then, and the smile which had never failed him throughout the days of suffering seemed to me more easy and hopeful. In less than an hour the shattered leg was off. In spite of the bad light and the rude appliances all went well, and with infinite relief we saw Soltké doze off under the merciful influence of the morphia which the doctor had brought. We felt that we had rounded the turn, and could afford to sleep easy. The little doctor, who had ridden seventy miles since sun-up, rolled into his blankets near where Soltké slept, and was in the land of dreams long before we, who were restless from very relief and joy, could settle down to close our eyes.
I seemed to have dozed for but a few minutes, when in my dreams, as it seemed to me, I heard in the faintest but clearest whisper the doctor saying: “Mortification, you know! I couldn’t see it by candle-light, or we might have spared him the operation.”
He was just dead. He sighed himself out, as the doctor said, like a tired child to sleep. We buried him close to the road under a big thorn-tree, which we stripped of its bark for a couple of feet to serve for a headstone for his grave. It was the tree where we had seen him on his knees at prayer. And as it neared sundown, we called for the oxen, and inspanned for the evening trek.
The doctor had gone. He had to get back those seventy miles to see another patient, whose life perhaps depended upon the grit of his gallant little horse.
During the night Munroe had managed to get loose, and with a madman’s cunning had got away with his horse and disappeared, which was perhaps a good thing for him.
The boys had packed everything on the waggons, and were lashing the bedding in the tent waggon so as to be out of the way of the dust and the thorns, when one of them picked up and handed out to us the open book and writing materials, just as Soltké had left them three days before, when he had jumped out to shoot the blue jay.
The diary lay open at the last-written page, and we read:
“The most verushius of reptile is the Whuy-per—”