She laid him down and turned away. A cruel choking had throttled her power of speech. With tears so streaming from her eyes that she went about her purpose half blind, she found a drier place in the road, gathered pine-needles less soaked than the rest, made a bed for him there, and spread upon it the blankets that he had been carrying. When she looked again into his face he was sleeping lightly, and his breathing betrayed great physical distress. As gently as a mother lifting her sleeping babe, she took him up in her arms, bore him to the bed, and with infinite care and tenderness laid him upon it. Then with some twigs and handkerchiefs she fashioned a canopy that shielded his head from the sun. She covered him with a free part of the blanket; but fearing that it would prove insufficient, she removed her outer skirt and covered him with that; these covers she tucked about him, that he might not easily throw them off.
He had not been roused by these attentions. She knelt beside him and gently kissed his hands, his cheeks, his forehead, his lips, and wiped away her streaming tears as they fell upon his face. He moved slightly, opened his eyes, looked into her face, and smiled. Very feebly he took her hand, brought it to his lips, kissed it, smiled again, closed his eyes, and with a sigh of weariness fell asleep. She knelt thus and watched him for a little while, seeing him sink deeper and deeper into slumber. Then she rose. And now may the great God give heart and strength for the mighty task ahead!
Not trusting herself to look back upon him, she gathered up her courage and started. On she went, her head high, her eyes aflame, her cheeks aglow. A suffocating, heart-aching loneliness haunted her, dogged her, gnawed at her spirit. More than once she wavered, weak and trembling, under the backward strain upon her heart-strings. More than once she cried aloud, “I can’t leave him! I can’t leave him! I must go back!” And then she would summon all her strength again, and cry, “It is for his sake that I go! It is to save him that I leave him!”
Thus, rended by contending agonies, she went on and on. With incredible self-torturings she pictured the dangers to which she had left him exposed. What had he meant by the wolves? Was there really danger from that source? Often in his sleep in the hut, and again when his mind would wander, he had spoken of the wolves, and always in terror; but most dreadful of all things to him was the she-wolf. Yet during all the time that she had been imprisoned with him in the hut there had not been the least sign of a wolf, not the most distant howl of one. Why had this hallucination been so persistent with him, so terrifying to him?
The miles seemed interminable. She kept her eyes and ears strained for signs and sounds of human life. At intervals she would call aloud with all her might, and after hearing the echo of her voice die away in the canon, wait breathlessly for a response that never came. With eager haste she pushed on. Clambering over fallen trees, heading gullies that she could not leap, wading swift rivulets with which the rapidly melting snow was still ploughing the road, she came at length within view of some men who were clearing the road with axes and mending it with shovels,—the rough, strong, silent, capable men of the mountains. She frantically waved her handkerchief and called as she went. They stopped their work and stood gazing at her in wondering silence. They saw that she was not of their kind; but their trained sensibilities informed them that the great mountains had been working their terrible will upon human helplessness, and they stood ready to put the strength of their arms and hearts into the human struggle.
Imperfectly clad as she was, her form and bearing suggesting a princess, her beauty, enhanced by her joy at finding help, radiant and dazzling, their wonder and shyness held them stolid and outwardly unresponsive, and they silently waited for her to speak. She went straight to them, and, looking at them one after another as she spoke, she said,—
“Will you help me, men? I left a man exhausted in the road some miles down the canon. I fear he is dying. Will you go with me and help me bring him up? Is there a doctor anywhere near? Is there a house to which we may take him?”
There was a moment of silence,—these men are slow, but all the surer for that.
One of them, a bearded, commanding man of middle age, said,—
“Yes, we will go and bring him up. A doctor lives up the canon. Maybe he’s at home. The man can’t walk?”