CHAPTER XXXI.

HOPELESS AND HELPLESS.

“Oh, Salome, he’s--we’re too late!” Andria, a ghostly figure enough in her torn white dressing-gown, in which she had lain down to take the sleep which had betrayed her trust, and with smears of dried blood on her face, leaned backward where she knelt. “They’ve killed him.”

“It ain’t de first,” answered Salome grimly, for all her panic of the slinking beasts that stood round their queer master. She dropped heavily down beside Heriot, and would have lifted the torn blanket that covered him, but a quiet word stopped her hand.

“Wait!” cried the old man. “It is not good that they smell the blood.” He waved his open hand with a queer circular motion, and the great cats turned and seemed to pour into the narrow passage in a living stream of yellow-white fur.

“I have told them to hunt for themselves,” he said slowly. “They will not come back till dawn.”

“Praise de Lawd for dat!” grunted Salome devoutly. She could put all her mind on the dead man now, and she swept off the blanket that covered him only to recoil in her turn, for so blood-soaked were his clothes that she could not tell where he had been wounded. His face was colorless and quiet over the crimson clothes that had been white; the woman touched him, peered into his face, and cried out:

“He ain’t dead, nor he ain’t dying,” she asserted. She undid his bloody shirt. “De ball must o’ glanced up on de bone. His ribs is broke from some reason--I dunno what, unless dey flung him down here!” She turned sharply to the old man who stood silently by.

“Where you find him?” she asked in the bad Spanish that had been her mother tongue years ago.

“She sent me out to get him, and I looked and looked. I came back and struck a track, wide like that,” measuring with his misshapen hands, “and blood on the bushes. At the top of the gully it stopped, and another track began, as if men had run--but light--with empty hands. And my cats whined and jumped down here. So I found him,” he answered simply. “It was not deep where he fell like it is here.”

Andria looked at the high cliff over her head and thanked Heaven the man who did this thing had been in the hurry that comes of mortal fear.

“You moved him here! How?” she cried, and Salome repeated her question.

He took a stone and rolled it over and over. But it was lucky for Andria she understood only the pantomime, not the words that went with it.

“I put him in the shade. Dead things bring flies in the sun, and I wanted him for my cats if she said I could have him. I went back to the house and called and called to ask her, but she never came.”

“Shut your head!” said Salome furiously, but also, with prudence, in English. “We got to take him home,” she went on; “he may die there or he mayn’t, but we must carry him. No, you ain’t fit; you’d stumble. I’ll take de head, and dat ole feller can carry de feet. We’ll lift him in de blanket.”

The old man nodded willingly enough when she explained, and Andria saw that it was even with alacrity that he lifted his end of the burden. She had reason to know his strength, yet she marveled at it in so miserable a body.

Salome’s stout arms were tense, and her breath came hard as she moved steadily along; but the wizened man seemed to feel neither weight nor fatigue.

Slowly and carefully the wretched procession reached the great white house that stood open in the desolate, red light of the sinking sun. Salome had seen wounds before, and it was as coolly as a hospital nurse that she did her poor best with this one. When she had done all she could she drew back and looked at Heriot lying on the wide, drawing-room sofa that must do duty for a bed, since it was impossible to carry him up-stairs.

“Now you can give him de brandy--just a little taste,” she said. “It wasn’t no good to bring him to just to wrestle wid me and jar dem bones.”

But even the brandy did not rouse him, since there was hardly any blood left in him. His eyelids flickered, and he swallowed; that was all. Yet Salome regarded him with a satisfied nod. He had begun to breathe better already. She waddled off to her kitchen to get something to eat, and sang hymns while she cooked, talking to herself with ludicrous effect between the verses.

“Glory, glory in de shining sky!” she sang, and broke off between tears and laughter. “He meant to leave dem two fur de jaguars to eat alive, and he meant to put me in de sea, for I see it in his face. And he’s dead and gone and et himself! I’m free! I’m free!” and in the midst of her ecstasy she stopped short at the thought of the girl who was taken.

“Pray. Miss Ber’l, pray!” she cried loudly, as if the girl could hear her. “Pray for de grave, for we can’t help you.”

Outside in the darkness of the drawing-room, Andria lay in a low chair, too exhausted to think, and felt a sudden, humble touch on her arm. The old man fell on his knees beside her and began to pour out a torrent of whispered Spanish. Half of it she knew to be questions, but she could not answer them, and, dazed, she shook her head.

With a hoarse cry of hopeless disappointment, the poor wretch leaped to his feet, and before she could call to Salome, was gone through the open door.

Andria sat up and put her hands to her aching head. It might be months before Heriot was himself again, and by that time what could they do?

There was a wounded man, herself, a black servant, and a madman to cope with Raimond Erle, who was already out of reach. With such poor allies and no money, how could she hope to reach England in time--or ever? With a gesture of sheer despair, she sank back again and closed her eyes. The very thing that would keep Raimond and Beryl apart she had never told the girl. She cursed her cowardice that could not speak out, that had solved itself by that photograph in a sealed envelope. She knew she had never opened it by the very way she had been bewildered, and looked from one to the other. It was useless now; she would not even look for the thing, that must be lying in Beryl’s room somewhere. She never wanted to see it again. It was too tangible a reminder of her trust that she had not kept from cowardly reluctance to speak her own shame.

In the dark, hushed room there sounded the faint breathing of the wounded man and a low sobbing that came from the very depths of a woman’s broken, desolate heart.