Yet that storm of water decreased with wonderful rapidity. In a few moments the gorge was hardly ankle-deep with a sliding, bubbling stream, and the wet, raw edges of the ravine dripped into the currents.
Then Torridon could look around him, and he saw that they stood on a little platform barely large enough to accommodate the two humans and the two horses. In the very center stood one thick-trunked tree, and doubtless its ancient roots, reaching far down, had been the one anchor that the moving waters had been unable to wrench away. Otherwise, man and horse must have gone down like straws in that dreadful mill.
The Indian now rose, though with great effort. He staggered, and had to lean a shoulder against the trunk of the tree. Then he threw up both his hands and burst into a chant louder than any he had uttered before. He seemed to be half mad with joy. Sometimes in the midst of his strange singing, laughter swelled in his throat. Tears of extreme joy shone in his eyes.
Torridon would have put the fellow down as a hopeless madman, but something in that ecstatic voice and in the raised head told him that the warrior was speaking to his creator. It was like a war song of triumph, it was also like a great prayer and a thanksgiving.
As for the meaning, Torridon had no clue, but he waited, determined to be wary and cautious.
Never take your eyes from a hostile, night or day, Roger Lincoln had said. He’ll count coup on you while you’re asleep, and take a scalp, even if he can’t get a hundred yards away before vengeance overtakes him.
When the song of the Indian ended, it seemed as though life had ended in him, also. He slid down the trunk of the tree until he lay crumpled at its base. His eyes were open and glaring; there was a faint froth on his lips. Torridon assured himself that the fellow was dead. But when he felt above the heart of the red man, he was aware of a faint pulsation, feeble, and very rapid and uneven. The body that had been so clammy to the touch was now burning with feverish heat. He was not dead, but he was very sick.
Torridon looked from their crumbling island across the long leagues of prairie that stretched on either side of the trees fringing the watercourse.
The temptation was plain in him to be away from this place and turn his back on the sick man. He knew nothing about such matters, but even a child could have told that, left unassisted, the other would die before the sun went down.
Then strong conscience took hold on Torridon. He set his teeth and looked about him, determined to fight off that death if he could. If he had been but six months on the plains, he might have had another viewpoint, filled with the prejudices of the trappers and hunters of the frontier, but to him now this was simply a human being with skin that was not white.
First of all he must get the man from the island, and that would not be easy. Then for a safer place to which to take him.
He went down to explore, the stallion and the mare slipping and stumbling after him down the sheer side of the bluff. From the bed of the stream he turned up the southern fork, and he had not gone a hundred yards before he discovered what he wanted—an opening among big trees on its bank, with a promise of present shelter.
He returned to the island, the two horses following close at his heels. The terror through which they had passed was still upon them. No doubt they felt that only the mysterious wisdom of the human had saved them from being caught into the whirl of the waters. Now they crowded at the heels of their protector. He had to wave them back as he climbed up the slope again.
He found the red man totally unconscious now. It was a limp body that he took into his arms and half carried, half dragged to the verge of the descent. There followed Herculean labor, getting his burden down to the level, but once there the task was much easier. He managed to fold the Indian like a half-filled sack over the back of the mare, because she was lower, and because Ashur no doubt would have bucked off such a burden as often as it was entrusted to him.
But Comanche went cheerfully along under this burden, and she climbed the bank of the southern fork and so brought the sick man to a new home.
The Indian had recovered a little from his trance. The violent jarring and hauling that he had received started him raving. And as Torridon lifted him from the back of the mare, the red man uttered a howl like the bay of a hunting wolf. Torridon almost let his burden fall as he heard that dreadful cry, but afterward the other lay still on the grass, muttering rapidly, his eyes closed or rolling wildly when they opened.
First of all he was dragged onto a blanket. Then with all the haste he could, Torridon prepared a bed of branches, made deep and soft as springs, and covered the top with soft sprigs of green. On this he heaved the Indian with difficulty, for the man was of a big frame, although greatly wasted.
Then there was a shelter to be erected. Torridon had seen enough woodcraft to know something about how it should be built. He had with him a strong hatchet. Rather, it was a broad axe-head, set upon a short haft, and with this he soon felled a number of saplings. The bed he had built close to the trunk of a big and spreading tree. He found a great fallen branch, dead for so long that it was greatly lightened in weight, but still tough and strong. Some fallen limbs rot at once; in others the wood is merely cured. It was all he could do to work the branch near the chosen spot and then to raise its lighter end and lodge it in the fork of the sheltering tree.
This branch now became his ridgepole. Against it he laid the saplings, and in a surprisingly short time he had a comparatively secure shelter. Afterward, when he had more leisure, he could complete the structure with some sort of thatching. In the meantime he had a place that would shield the sick man from the night air.
It was dark when all this had been done, yet he worked on, taking off the packs, arranging the contents within the tent house, and then preparing food.
For his own part, he was ravenously hungry, but when he made a broth of the jerked venison and offered it at the lips of the sick man, the latter clenched his teeth and refused all sustenance. Torridon heaved a cruel sigh of relief. It might be that he would be freed from his captivity by the immediate death of the red man.
IV
That early hope was not fulfilled. For three days the Indian raved and raged and muttered day and night. For a week after that his fever was still high. And then it left him.
If left him a helpless wreck, a ghost of a man. His belly clove against his spine. Deep purple hollows lay between the ribs. His face was shrunken mortally. With his sunken eyes and his great arch of a nose and his projecting chin he looked like a cartoon of a predatory monster. But his wits had returned to him. He lay on the bed and rolled his eyes toward Torridon, and there was, for the first time, sense and life in that glance.
Torridon was enormously cheered. He fell to work with all his might to complete the task that he had pushed forward so far and so well. He had arranged small snares. Each day, out of them he took rabbits and small birds, and he cooked little broths and then stronger stews, and the red man ate and gained slowly in strength.
Torridon knew something about the care of fever patients. At least that they must be fed only a little at a time. Certainly he overdid caution and delayed the recovery of the red man’s strength, but every step forward was a sure step, and never once did the convalescent beg for more food, even when there was a raging fire of hunger in his eyes.