Page:Cornelia Meigs-The Pirate of Jasper Peak.djvu/182

 about him than about anything else. At night he would be out of his head, sometimes,  and in the daytime he would just trudge along at  my heels and never say a word. Only once, when I said that if we ever found the lake we might come out somewhere near Oscar Dansk’s house, he got furiously angry and made me promise that  I would never ask him for help. I don’t know yet what idea he had in his poor confused head,  but I had to promise, to quiet him.”

He told further of their growing weakness, of the shorter and shorter distances they could travel  in a day, of a final afternoon when, having gone  to shoot a partridge, he had come back and found  his brother had disappeared.

"Perhaps I hadn’t realized until that minute how desperately ill he was. He had wandered  off; I could see the storm coming and I looked  and looked and called and called, but I couldn’t  find him. I felt pretty hopeless, I can tell you.”

It was Nicholas who had discovered John Edmonds at last, lying insensible under a big tree