"Sidney!" she cried through the stillness, at last. "Sidney! Are you there?"
The night surrendered no response, save some animal cry far off where the barque was rotting.
"If he's dead!" she moaned. "If he's dead!"
But he might be wounded and helpless, she thought, with no one to come to his side. He might not be hurt unto death itself—if aid could reach him now!
If he died—if he left her thus alone—— A thousand times she preferred to die beside him!
"Sidney!" she cried, as before.
With a strange dry note, choked back between her lips, she fled once more to the fire.
Meantime the man by the tiger's kill continued to lie without motion on the earth. Not even the glow of his cheering brand remained like a sign of life in that silent theater.
The jungle cat, smitten and addled in its brain, had dragged itself painfully away to the cover of the thicket, its instinct feebly alive. There was not a sound in all the place, where crash and roar had been so tremendously expended for one prodigious second.
A vague, weird dream came finally creeping intangibly through Grenville's brain, resuming an intermittent function. When at length it began a little to clear, he dreamed he was trying his utmost to rise, but something held him down.