Page:Cornelia Meigs--The windy hill.djvu/39

Rh from within. The only thing that seemed alive was a dull, glowing coal in the ashes of a fire that was not quite dead. The boy stooped down before the door and spoke in a shaking voice:

"Secotan, Secotan, do you still live?"

A hollow, gasping whisper sounded from the shadows within:

"I am living, but death is very near."

Nashola stood still for a moment. He could picture that gaunt figure lying helpless on the ground, with the darkness all about peopled by strange shapes visible to the sorcerer's eyes alone, crowding spirits come to carry him away to an unknown world. But even as a wave of icy terror swept over him, he remembered how fearful it would be to lie all alone in that haunted darkness, and he bent low and slipped through the door.

"I know that all the spirits of the earth and air and water are with you," he said as he felt his way to the deerskin bed and sat down beside it, "but I thought, among them all, you might wish for a friend beside you who was flesh and blood."

A quivering hand was laid for an instant on his knee.

"There is no man who does not feel terror when he comes to die alone," the medicine man whispered, "and Secotan is less of a man than you."

Through the dragging hours Nashola sat beside him, listening with strained ears to every sound—the soft moving of a snake through the grass before