“Patience, lad, patience. That’s one o’ the vartues, I believe; leastwise, so I’m told. Ah, it’s caught at last. (Hand me that dry stuff on the south shelf, Mary; ye can find it i’ the dark, I doubt not.) Yes, it’s a vartue, but I can’t boast o’ having much o’t myself. I dun know much about it from ’xperience, d’ye see? There, now, we’ll git things put to rights,” he added, applying the kindled spark to some dry chips and producing a flame, with which he ignited a pine-knot, and stuck it blazing in a cleft in the rock. “Just see what them reptiles ha’ done to me. If it wasn’t that I’m a good-tempered feller, I b’lieve I’d git angry. See, March, boy, there’s a shelf in the corner that’s escaped the flood. Lie ye down there, while Mary and me puts the place in order.”
“I’d rather help you,” said March dismally. “I don’t b’lieve it can make me worse, an’ perhaps it’ll make me better. I wonder what in the world pain was made for.”
“Ye’ll only be in our way, lad. Lie down,” said Dick, seizing a large broom and beginning to sweep away the water and ashes and pieces of charcoal with which the floor was plentifully covered, while Mary picked up the scattered skins and furniture of the cave, and placed them on the ledge of rock, about four feet from the ground, which Dick termed a shelf.
This ledge ran all round the apartment, so March selected a corner, and, throwing a dry skin upon it, stretched himself thereon, and soon found his sufferings relieved to such an extent that he began to question his host as to his sudden and unlooked-for return.
“How came ye to drop in upon us in the very nick o’ time like that?” he said, gazing languidly at Mary, who bustled about with the activity of a kitten—or, to use an expression more in keeping with the surrounding circumstances, a wild kitten.
Dick, without checking his broom, told how he had discovered the tracks of the Indians, and returned at once, as has been related.
“Then,” said March, looking anxiously at his host, “you’ll not be able to help my poor comrades and the people at the Mountain Fort.”
“It an’t poss’ble to be in two places at once nohow ye can fix it,” returned Dick, “else I’d ha’ been there as well as here in the course of a few hours more.”
“But should we not start off at once—now?” cried March eagerly, throwing his legs off the ledge and coming to a sitting position.
“You an’t able,” replied Dick quietly, “and I won’t move till I have put things to rights here, an’ had a feed an’ a night’s rest. If it would do any good, I’d start this minute. But the fight’s over by this time—leastwise, it’ll be over long afore we could git there! and if it’s not to be a fight at all, why nobody’s none the worse, d’ye see?”