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Rob Harlow's Adventures: A Story of the Grand Chaco, a fiction by George Manville Fenn |
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Chapter 29. Friend And Patient |
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_ CHAPTER TWENTY NINE. FRIEND AND PATIENT They had sought in vain for the lost man; and when in utter despair they had been on the point of giving up the search, he had struggled back to them, his last steps guided by the fire when he had felt that he must lie down utterly exhausted, to die. "Mr Brazier! At last!" cried Rob; and he went down upon his knee and grasped his leader's hand, but there was no response, and the fingers he held were cold as ice. "Here, lend a hand, Mr Rob, sir," cried Shaddy roughly, "and help me to get him on my back." "Let me help carry him." "No, sir; my way's easiest--quickest, and will hurt him least. He's half dead of starvation, and cold as cold. Quick, sir! let's get him down by the fire. It will be too dark in the hovel to do anything." Rob helped to raise the wanderer, Shaddy swung him on his back lightly and easily, and stepping quickly toward the fire, soon had the poor fellow lying with his feet exposed to the blaze, while water was given to him a little at a time, and soon after a few morsels of the tender fish, which he swallowed with difficulty. They had no rest that night, but, with the strange cries and noises of the forest around them, mingled with the splashings and danger-threatening sounds of the river, they tended and cared for the insensible man, giving him food and water from time to time, but in quantities suggestive of homoeopathic treatment. Still they felt no fatigue for the great joy in both their hearts, for neither of them had the faintest hope of ever seeing their leader again. Once or twice during the night Mr Brazier had seemed so cold and rigid that Rob had glanced wildly at the guide, who replied by feeling the insensible man's feet. "Only sleep, my lad!" he said softly. "I daresay he will not come to for a couple of days. A man can't pass through the horror of being lost without going off his head more or less." "Do you think he'll be delirious, then?" "Off his head, my lad? Yes. It will be almost like a fever, I should say, and we shall have to nurse him a long time till he comes round." The guide was quite right. The strong man was utterly brought down by the terrible struggle of the past three days, and as they looked at his hollow eyes and sunken cheeks it was plain to see what he had suffered bodily from hunger, while his wanderings told of how great the shock must have been to his brain. The mystery of the blood was explained simply enough by his roughly bandaged left arm, on which as they examined it, while he lay perfectly weak and insensible, they found a severe wound cleanly cut by a knife. "He must have been attacked, then," cried Rob as he looked at the wound in horror, while in a quiet, methodical way Shaddy proceeded to sew it together by the simple process of thrusting a couple of pins through the skin and then winding a thread of silk round them in turn from head to point, after which he firmly bandaged the wound before making a reply to Rob's words. "Yes, my lad," he said; "right arm attacked his left. He must have been making a chop at some of the plants on a branch, and the tool slipped. You take out his knife and open it, and see if it ain't marked." Shaddy was quite right, for there on the handle were some dried-up traces of how the wound must have bled. It was a week before the patient began to show tokens of amendment, during which time Rob and Shaddy had been hard pressed for ways to supply his wants. There were endless things necessary for the invalid which they could not supply, but, from old forest lore and knowledge picked up during his adventurous life, the guide was able to find the leaves of a shrub, which leaves he beat into a pulp between two pebbles, put the bruised stems into the cup of a water flask, added water, and gave it to the patient to drink. "It is of no use to ask me what it is, Mr Rob, sir," said the guide; "all I know is that the Indians use it, and that there isn't anything better to keep down fever and get up strength." "Then it must be quinine," said Rob. "No, my lad; it isn't that, but it's very good. These wild sort of people seem to have picked up the knack of doctoring themselves and of finding out poisons to put on their arrows somehow or another, and there's no nonsense about them." The prisoners in the vast forest--for they were as much prisoners as if shut up in some huge building--had to scheme hard to obtain their supplies so as to make them suitable to their patient. Fish they caught, as a rule, abundantly enough; birds they trapped and shot with arrows; and fruit was to be had after much searching; but their great want was some kind of vessel in which to cook, till after several failures Rob built up a very rough pot of clay from the river bed by making long thin rolls and laying one upon the other and rubbing them together. This pot he built up on a piece of thin shaley stone, dried it in the sun, and ended by baking it in the embers--covering it over with the hot ashes, and leaving it all one night. Shaddy watched him with a grim smile, and kept on giving him words of encouragement, as he worked, tending Mr Brazier the while, brushing the flies away and arranging green boughs over him to keep him in the shade, declaring that he would be better out there in the open than in the forest. "Well done, my lad!" said the old sailor as Rob held up the finished pot before placing it in the fire; "'tis a rough 'un, but I daresay there has been worse ones made. What I'm scared about is the firing. Strikes me it will crack all to shivers." To Rob's great delight, the pot came out of the wood ashes perfectly sound, and their next experiment was the careful stewing down of an iguana and the production of a quantity of broth, which Shaddy pronounced to be finer than any chicken soup ever made; Rob, after trying hard to conquer his repugnance to food prepared from such a hideous-looking creature, said it was not bad; and their patient drank with avidity. "There," said Shaddy, "we shall go on swimmingly in the kitchen now; and as we can have hot water I don't see why we shouldn't have some tea." "You'd better go to the grocer's, then, for a pound," said Rob, with a laugh. "Oh no, I shan't," said Shaddy; "here's plenty of leaves to dry in the sun such as people out here use, and you'll say it ain't such bad tea, neither; but strikes me, Mr Rob, that the sooner you make another pot the better." Rob set to at once, and failed in the baking, but succeeded admirably with his next attempt, the new pot being better baked than the old, and that night he partook of some of Shad's infusion of leaves, which was confessed to be only wanting in sugar and cream to be very palatable. That day they found a deer lying among the bushes, with the neck and breast eaten, evidently the puma's work, and, after what Shaddy called a fair division, the legs and loins were carried off to roast and stew, giving the party, with the fruit and fish, a delightful change. The next day was one to be marked with a red letter, for towards evening Mr Brazier's eyes had in them the look of returned consciousness. Rob saw it first as he knelt down beside his friend, who smiled at him faintly, and spoke in quite a whisper. From that hour he began to amend fast, and a week after he related how, in his ardour to secure new plants, he had lost his bearings, and gone on wandering here and there in the most helpless way, sustaining life on such berries and other fruits as he could find, till the horror of his situation was more than his brain could bear. Face to face with the fact that he might go on wandering there till forced by weakness to lie down and die, he said the horror mastered him all at once, and the rest was like some terrible dream of going on and on, with intervals that were full of delight, and in which he seemed to be amongst glorious flowers, which he was always collecting, till the heaps crushed him down, and all was horror, agony, and wild imagination. Then he awoke lying beneath the bower of leaves, shaded from the sunshine, listening to the birds, the rushing sound of the river, and, best of all, the voices of his two companions. _ |
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