Sully lay crouched against a boulder where he had crawled for the sun heat. Rags of clothing hung upon his gaunt frame, through which the sharp bones strove to pierce; also at sight of his hands and feet they shuddered. With the former he had covered his eyes from the ravens, but his cheeks and head were bloody and shredded. He muttered constantly, like the thick whirring of machinery run down.
"Oh, my God!" Buck whispered.
Crowley had mastered himself and knelt beside the figure. He looked up and tears lay on his cheeks.
"Look at them hands and feet! That was done by fire and frost together. He must have fell in his own camp-fires after he went crazy."
The garments were burned off to elbow and knee, while the flesh was black and raw.
Tenderly they carried the gabbing creature down to the timber and laid him on a bed of boughs. His condition told the grim tale of his wanderings, crazed with hunger and hardship.
Heating water, they poured it into him, dressing his wounds with strips from their underclothes. Of stimulants they had none, but fed him the last pinch of flour, together with the final rasher of salt pork, although they knew that these things are not good for starving men. For many days they had traveled on less than quarter rations themselves.
"What will we do?"
"It ain't over twenty miles to the niggers'. He'll die before we can get help back. D'ye reckon we can carry him?"
It was not sympathy which prompted Crowley, for he sympathized with his boyish companion, whose sufferings it hurt him sorely to augment. It was not pity; he pitied himself, and his own deplorable condition; nor did mercy enter into his processes, for the man had mercilessly planned to kill him, and he likewise had nursed a bitter hatred against him, which misfortune could only dim. It was not these things which moved him, but a vaguer, wilder quality; an elemental, unspoken, indefinable feeling of brotherhood throughout the length of the North, teaching subtly, yet absolutely and without appeal, that no man shall be left in his extremity to the cruel harshness of this forbidding land.