CHAPTER V.

‘O, THAT WAY MADNESS LIES.’

The fever raged severely. Delirium held Geoffrey’s brain in its hideous thraldom. Horrid sights and scenes pursued him. He looked at his friend’s face with blank unseeing eyes, or looked and beheld something that was not there—the countenance of an enemy.

Lucius felt himself now between two fires—disease on one side, famine on the other. Between these two devastators death seemed inevitable. Absalom Schanck, sorely wasted from his native plumpness, sat by the hearth and watched the struggle, resigned to the idea of his own approaching end.

Geoffrey’s illness reduced them to a far worse situation than they had been in before, since he was their chief sportsman, and had done much to ward off starvation. Lucius took his gun out for a couple of hours every morning, leaving the invalid in Absalom’s charge, and prowled the forest in search of game. But with the exception of one solitary marten, whose tainted flesh had been revolting even to their hunger, his wanderings had been barren of everything but disappointment.

Matchi and the guide had been gone a week, when Lucius set out one morning more desperate than usual, hunger gnawing his entrails, and worse than hunger, a fear that weighed upon his heart like lead—the fear that before many days were gone Geoffrey Hossack would have set forth upon a longer and a darker journey than that they two had started upon together, in the full flush of youth and hope, a year and a half ago. He could not conceal from himself that his friend was in imminent danger—that unless the fever, for which medicine could do so little, abated speedily, all must soon be over. Nor could he conceal from himself another fact—namely, that the stores he had doled out with such a niggard hand would not yield even that scanty allowance for twenty-four hours longer. A sorry frame of mind in which to stalk buffalo or chase the moose!

Again Fortune was unkind. He wandered farther than usual in his determination not to go back empty-handed. He knew but too well that in Geoffrey’s desperate state there was nothing his experience could do that Absalom’s ignorance could not do as well. In fact there was nothing to be done. The patient lay in a kind of stupor. Only the gentle nursing-mother Nature could help him now.

He came upon a circular patch of prairie in the heart of the forest, and surprised a lean and lonely buffalo, the first he had seen for more than a month. The last had been shot by Geoffrey some days before the guide’s departure on his useless journey. The animal was scratching in the snow, trying to get at the scanty herbage under that frozen surface, when Lucius came upon it. His footsteps, noiseless in his moccasins, did not startle the quarry. He stole within easy range, and fired. The first shot hit the animal in the shoulder; then came a desperate chase. The buffalo ran, but feebly. Lucius fired his second barrel, this time at still closer quarters, and the brute, gaunt and famished like himself, rolled head downwards on the snow.

He took out his hunting-knife, cut out the tongue and choicer morsels, as much as he could carry, and then with infinite labour buried his prey in the snow, meaning to return next morning with Absalom to fetch the remainder; provided always that the snow kept his secret, and wolves or wolverines did not devour his prize in the interval. He was able to carry away with him food that would serve for more than a week. No matter how hard or skinny the flesh might be,—it was flesh.

Darkness had closed round him when these labours were finished, but stars shone faintly above the pine-tops: and he carried a pocket-lantern which he could light on emergency. Where was he? That was the first question to be settled. He found some difficulty in recalling the track he had taken. Great Heaven! if he had strayed too far afield, and should find return impossible! Geoffrey yonder dying, without his brotherly arm to support the drooping head, his loving hand to wipe the brow on which the death-damps gathered! The very thought made him desperate. He looked up at the stars, his only guides, shouldered his burden, and walked rapidly in that direction which he supposed the right one.

During their enforced idleness, Geoffrey and Lucius had made themselves tolerably familiar with the aspect of the forest within a radius of ten miles or so from their hut. They knew the course of the river, and its tributary streams. They had even cut rude avenues through the pine-wood, in their quest of fuel, cutting down trees in a straight line at a dozen yards apart, leaving six feet or so of the trunk standing, like a rude pillar; so that within half a mile of their encampment there were on every side certain roughly-marked approaches.

But to-night Lucius had lost ken of the river, and knew himself to be a good ten miles from any tree that he or Geoffrey had ever hewn asunder. He stopped after about half-an-hour’s tramp; felt himself at fault; lighted his lantern, and looked about him.

An impenetrable forest; a scene of darksome grandeur, gigantic pine-trees towering skyward, laden with snow; but over all a dreadful monotony, that made the picture gloomy as the shores of Acheron. Nor could Lucius discover any landmark whereby he might steer his course.

He stopped for some minutes, his heart beating heavily. It was not the fear of peril to himself that tormented him. His mind—rarely a prey to selfish fears—was full of his dying friend.

‘To be away at such a time!’ he thought; ‘to have shared all the brightest hours of my youth with him, and not to be near him at the last!’

This was bitter. He pushed on desperately, muttering a brief prayer; telling himself that Heaven could not be so cruel as to sever him from the friend who was dear as a brother, who represented to him all he had ever known of brotherly love.

He paused suddenly, startled by a sight so unexpected that his arm dropped nerveless, and his burden fell at his feet. A light in the thick forest; the welcome glare of a traveller’s fire. Not the far-spreading blaze of conflagration, the devouring flames stretching from tree to tree—a spectacle he had seen in the course of his wanderings—but the steady light of a mighty fire of heaped-up pine-logs; a fire to keep wolves and grisly bears at bay, and to defy the blighting presence of the frost-fiend himself.

Lucius resumed his burden, and made straight for the fire. A wide and deep circle, making a kind of basin, had been dug out of the snow. In the centre burned a huge fire, and before it a man lay on his stomach, his chin resting on his folded arms, lazily watching the blazing logs; a man with wild hair and wilder eyes; a man whose haggard face even the red glow of the fire could not brighten.

‘What!’ cried Lucius, recognising him at the first glance; ‘have you got no farther than this, Matchi? A sorry result of your boasted cleverness! Where’s the Indian?’

‘I don’t know,’ the other answered shortly. ‘Dead, perhaps, before this. We quarrelled and parted two days ago. The man’s a knave and a ruffian.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Lucius. ‘He persevered, I suppose; pushed on towards the fort, and you didn’t. That’s the meaning of your quarrel.’

‘Have it so, if you like,’ returned the stranger with scornful carelessness. Then seeing that Lucius still stood upon the edge of the circle—a bank of snow—looking down at him, he lifted his dark eyes slowly, and returned the gaze.

‘Have things brightened with you since we parted company?’ he asked.

‘How should they brighten, unless Providence sent some luckier wanderers across our track?—not a likely event at this time of year. No, the aspect of our affairs has darkened to the deepest gloom. Geoffrey Hossack is dying of fever.’

‘Amidst universal cold—strange anomaly!’ said the other, in his hard unpitying voice. ‘But since death seems inevitable for all of us, I’d gladly change lots with your friend—burn with fever—and go out of this world unconscious. It is looking death in the face that tortures me: to lie here, looking into that fire, and calculate the slow but too swift hours that stand between me and—annihilation. _That_ gnaws my vitals.’

Lucius looked down at the strongly-marked passionate face, half in scorn, half in pity.

‘You can see no horizon beyond your grave under these pine-trees,’ he said. ‘You do not look upon this life as an education for the better life that is to succeed it?’

‘No. I had done with that fable before I was twenty.’

A hard cruel face, with the red fire shining in it—the face of a man who, knowing himself unfit for heaven, was naturally disposed to unbelief in a future, which for this dark soul could only mean expiation.

‘Can you help me to find my way back to the hut?’ Lucius asked, after a meditative pause.

‘Not I. I thought I was a hundred miles from it. I have been wandering in a circle, I suppose.’

‘Evidently. Where did you leave Kekek-ooarsis?’

The stranger looked at him doubtfully, as if hardly understanding the drift of the question. Lucius repeated it.

‘I don’t know. There is no “where” in this everlasting labyrinth. We disagreed, and parted—somewhere!’

Lucius Davoren’s gaze, wandering idly about that sunken circle in the snow, where every inch of ground was fitfully illuminated by the ruddy glare of the pine-logs, was suddenly attracted by an object that provoked his curiosity—a little heap of bones, half burnt, at the edge of the fire. The flame licked them every now and then, as the wind blew it towards them.

‘You have had a prize, I see,’ he said, pointing to these bones. ‘Biggish game! How did you manage without a gun?’

‘A knife is sometimes as good as a gun!’ said the other, without looking up. He stretched out his long lean arm as he spoke, and pushed the remainder of his prey farther into the fire.

In a moment—before the other was aware—Lucius had leaped down into the circle, and was on his knees, dragging the bones back out of the fire with his naked hands.

‘Assassin! devil!’ he cried, turning to the stranger with a look of profoundest loathing: ‘I thought as much. These are human bones. This is the fore-arm of a man.’

‘That’s a lie,’ the other answered coolly. ‘I snared a wolf, and stabbed him with my clasp-knife.’

‘I have not worked in the dissecting-room for nothing,’ said Lucius quietly. ‘Those are human bones. You have staved off death by murder.’

‘If I had, it would be no worse than the experience of a hundred shipwrecks,’ answered the other, glancing from Lucius to his gun, with an air at once furtive and ferocious, like some savage beast at bay.

‘I have half a mind to shoot you down like the wolf you are,’ said Lucius, rising slowly from his knees, after throwing the bones back into the blaze.

‘Do it, and welcome,’ answered the stranger, casting off all reserve with a contemptuous tone, that might be either the indifference of desperation or mere bravado. ‘Famine knows no law. I have done only what I daresay you would have done in my situation. We had starved, literally starved—no half rations, but sheer famine—for five days, when I killed him with a sudden stroke of my hatchet. I cut off one arm, and buried the rest of him—yonder, under the snow. I daresay I was half-mad when I did it. Yet it was a mercy to put him out of his misery. If he had been a white skin, I should have tossed up with him which was to go, but I didn’t stand on punctilio with a nigger. It may be my turn next, perhaps. Shoot me, and welcome, if you’ve a mind to waste a charge of powder on so miserable a wretch.’

‘No,’ said Lucius, ‘no one has made me your judge or your executioner. I leave you to your conscience. But if ever you darken the threshold of our hut again—be your errand what it may—by the God above us both, you shall die like a dog!’

Matchi’s keen eyes followed the vanishing form of his accuser, and his thin lips shaped themselves into a triumphant grin.

‘You didn’t inquire about the money the Indian carried,’ he muttered. ‘_That_ was my real motive. Better to be thought a cannibal than a thief. And with that money I can begin life again if ever I get clear of this forest.’

* * * * *

Lucius Davoren spent that night in the forest, by a fire of his own kindling, after having put some distance between himself and that other wanderer. He recruited exhausted nature with a buffalo steak, and then sat out the night by his lonely fire; sometimes dozing, more often watching, knowing not when murder might creep upon him with stealthy footfall across the silent snow. Morning came, however, and the night had brought no attack. By daylight he regained the lost trail, found his way back to the hut, laden with his spoil, and to his unspeakable joy found a change for the better in the sick man.

‘I have gaven him his traft, bongdual,’ said Mr. Schanck, pointing to the empty medicine bottle, ‘and he is gooller; he bersbires. Dat is goot.’

‘Von der Stirne heisse, Rinnen muss der Schweiss.’

Yes, perspiration had arisen, nature’s healing dew; not the awful damps of swift-coming death. Lucius knelt by the rough bed, and thanked God for this happy change. How sweet was prayer at such a moment! He thought of that murderous wretch in the forest, waiting for the death he had sought to defer by famine’s last loathsome resource; that revolting expedient which it was horror to think of—a lost wretch without a hope beyond the grave, without belief in a God.

On his knees, his breast swollen by the rapture of gratitude and glad surprise, Lucius thought of that wretch almost with pity.

He made a strong broth with some of the buffalo flesh, and fed his patient by spoonfuls. To rally from such prostration must needs be a slow process; but once hopeful of his friend’s recovery, Lucius was content to wait for the issue in quiet confidence.

He told Absalom his adventure in the forest, the hideous discovery of the faithful Indian’s fate.

‘Vat for a man! And vhen he has digesded the Indian, and feels again vhat boor Geoffrey used to gall a vaguum, he vill gome and ead us,’ said the German despondently.

‘He will not cross this threshold. What! do you think I would let that ravening beast approach _him_?’ pointing to the prostrate figure on the bed. ‘I have told him what I should do if he came here. He knows the penalty.’

‘You vould gill him?’

‘Without one scruple.’

‘I tink you are in your right,’ answered Absalom tranquilly. ‘It is an onbleasant itea do be eaden.’

Two days passed slowly. Geoffrey rallied. Very slow was the progress towards recovery—almost imperceptible to the non-professional eye, but it was progress. Lucius perceived it, and was thankful. He had not slept since that night in the forest, but watched all night beside the patient’s bed—his gun within reach of his hand, loaded with ball.

On the third night of his watch, when Geoffrey had been wandering a little, and then had fallen into a placid slumber, there came a sound at the door—a sound that was neither the waving of a pine-branch nor the cry of bird or beast; a sound distinctly human.

Lucius had barricaded his door with a couple of pine-trunks, placed transversely, like a St. Andrew’s cross. The door itself was a fragile contrivance (three or four roughly-hewn planks nailed loosely together), but the St. Andrew’s cross made a formidable barrier.

He heard the door tried with a rough impatient hand. The pine-trunks groaned, but held firm. The door was shaken again; then, after a moment’s pause, the same impatient hand shook the little parchment window. This offered but a frail defence; it rattled, yielded, then, after one vigorous thrust, burst inward, and a dark ragged head and strong bony shoulders appeared in the opening.

‘I am starving,’ cried a hoarse voice, faint, yet with a strange force in its hollow tones. It was the voice of the man who called himself Matchi. ‘Give me shelter—food—if you have any to give. It is my last chance,’ he gasped breathlessly.

He widened the space about him with those strong desperate arms, and made as if he would have leapt into the hut. Lucius raised his gun, cocked it, and took aim deliberately, without an instant’s hesitation.

‘I told you what would happen if you came here,’ he said, and, with the words, fired.

The man fell backwards, dragging the thin parchment window and some part of its fragile framework with him. His death-clutch had fastened on the splintered wood. A wild gust of north-east wind rushed in through the blank space in the log wall, but Lucius Davoren did not feel it.

‘Great God!’ he asked himself, a slow horror creeping through his ice-cold veins, ‘was that a murder?’

END OF THE PROLOGUE.

Book the First.