“You are, perhaps; I know not. I will save you if possible.”
These words were accompanied by a kind look and a comforting pat on the shoulder, which, it may be, did more for the sick man than the best of physic. At all events the result was a sudden grasp of the hand and a look of gratitude which spoke volumes. The robber was about to give vent to his feelings in speech when the door opened, and the burly host, putting his head in, announced that supper was ready.
Giving his patient another reassuring pat, the young doctor left him and returned to the banqueting-hall of the mountain farm, where he found that Manuela, Pedro, and Quashy were more or less earnestly engaged with the contents of the iron pot.
Chapter Five.
Lawrence and Quashy become “Flosuffical,” and they camp out beside the “Giant’s Castle.”
While the party were at supper the first gusts of a storm, which had for some time been brewing, shook the little hut, and before they had all fallen into the profound slumber which usually followed their day’s journey, a heavy gale was howling among the mountain gorges with a noise like the roaring of a thousand lions. For two days the gale raged so furiously that travelling—especially in the higher regions of the Andes—became impossible. The Indian girl, Pedro, and the negro, bore their detention with that stoicism which is not an infrequent characteristic of mountaineers, guides, and savages. As for our hero, he devoted himself and all his skill to his patient—to which duty he was the more reconciled that it afforded him a good opportunity at once for improving his Spanish and pointing out to the bandit the error of his ways.
To do the man justice, he seemed to be fully sensible of the young doctor’s kindness, and thanked him, with tears in his eyes, not only for his previous intention to save him from the tremendous fall over the cliff, but for his subsequent efforts to alleviate the evil consequences thereof.
It mattered nothing to the great warm-hearted, loose-jointed Englishman that when he mentioned these hopeful signs in his patient to Pedro, that worthy shook his head and smiled sarcastically, or that Quashy received the same information with a closing of the eyes and an expansion of the jaws which revealed the red recesses of his throat to their darkest deeps! Lawrence, being a man of strong opinions, was not to be shaken out of them either by sarcasm or good-humoured contempt.