“Lord, how hungry I am!” he breathed. “I bet the feller's got grub in there.” He had been out two days. He was light-headed from lack of food; at the thought of it nervous caution gave way to mere brute instinct, and he plunged recklessly into the cave. Inside, the sudden darkness blinded him for a moment. Then there began to be visible in one corner a bed of bracken and sweet-fern; in another an orderly arrangement of tin cans upon a shelf, and the ashes of a fire, where sat a Dutch oven. The sight of this last whetted Kerry's hunger; he almost ran to the shelf, and groaned as he found the first can filled with gunpowder, the next with shot, and the third containing some odds and ends of string and nails.
He had knelt to inspect a rude box, when a little sound caused him to turn. In the doorway was a figure which raised the hair upon his head, with a chilly sensation at its roots—a tall man, with a great mane of black locks blowing unchecked about his shoulders. He stood turned away from Kerry, having halted in the doorway as though to take a last advantage of the outer daylight upon some object of interest to him before entering. He was examining one of his own hands, and a little shivering moan escaped him. A rifle rested in the hollow of his arm; Kerry could see the outline of a big navy-pistol in his belt; and as the man shifted, another came to view; while the Irishman's practised eye did not miss the handle of a long knife in its sheath. It went swiftly through his mind that those who sent him on this errand should have warned him of the size of the quarry. Suddenly, almost without his own volition, he found himself saying: “I ask your pardon. I was dead beat an' fair famished, an' I crawled in here to—”
The tall figure in the doorway turned like a thing on a pivot; he did not start, nor spin round, as a slighter or more nervous person might have done; and a strange chill fell upon Kerry's heat when the man, whom he recognized as that one he had come to seek, faced him. The big, dark eyes looked the intruder up and down; what their owner thought of him, what he decided concerning him, could no more be guessed than the events of next year. In a full, grave voice, but one exceedingly gentle, the owner of the cave repaired the lack of greeting.
“Howdy, stranger?” he said. “I never seen you as I come up, 'count o' havin' snagged my hand on this here gun.”
He came toward Kerry with the bleeding member outstretched. Now was the Irishman's time—by all his former resolutions, by the need he had for that money reward—to deftly handcuff the outlaw. What he did was to draw the other toward the daylight, examine the hand, which was torn and lacerated on the gun-hammer, and with sundry exclamations of sympathy proceed to bind it up with strips torn from his own handkerchief.
“Snagged!” he echoed, as he noted how the great muscle of the thumb was torn across. “I don't see how you ever done that on a gun-hammer. I've nursed a good bit—I was in Cuby last year, an' I was detailed for juty in the hospital more'n half my time,” he went on, eagerly. “This here hand, it's bad, 'cause it's torn. Ef you had a cut o' that size, now, you wouldn't be payin' no 'tention to it. The looks o' this here reminds me o' the tear one o' them there Mauser bullets makes—Gawd! but they rip the men up shockin'!” He rambled on with uneasy volubility as he attended to the wound. “You let me clean it, now. It'll hurt some, but it'll save ye trouble after while. You set down on the bed. Where kin I git some water?”
“Thar's a spring round the turn in the cave thar—they's a go'd in it.”
But Kerry took one of the tin cans, emptied and rubbed it nervously, talking all the while—talking as though to prevent the other from speaking, and with something more than the ordinary garrulity of the nurse. “I got lost to-day,” he volunteered, as he cleansed the wound skilfully and drew its ragged lips together. “Gosh! but you tore that thumb up! You won't hardly be able to do nothin' with that hand fer a spell. Yessir! I got lost—that's what I did. One tree looks pretty much like another to me; and one old rock it's jest the same as the next one. I reckon I've walked twenty mile sence sunup.”
He paused in sudden panic; but the other did not ask him whence he had walked nor whither he was walking. Instead, he ventured, in his serious tones, as the silence grew oppressive: “You're mighty handy 'bout this sort o' thing. I reckon I'll have a tough time here alone till that hand heals.”
“Oh, I'll stay with you a while,” Kerry put in, hastily. “I ain't a-goin' on, a-leavin' a man in sech a fix, when I ain't got nothin' in particular to do an' nowheres in particular to go,” he concluded, rather lamely.