Page:Scribner's Monthly, Volume 12 (May–October 1876).djvu/318

312

CHAPTER XLIV. IN WHICH HECTOR ARISES FROM THE DITCH.

stood for a moment breathless and paralyzed with surprise; then he began slowly and deliberately to examine the tunnel step by step. When he had proceeded a hundred feet from the spot, to his great relief he came upon Jack Hamlin, sitting upright in a side-drift. His manner was feverish and excited, and his declaration that he had not moved from the place where Gabriel had left him, at once was accepted by the latter as the aberration of incipient inflammation and fever. When Gabriel stated that it was time to go, he replied, "Yes," and added with such significance that his business with the murderer of Victor Ramirez was now over, and that he was ready to enter the Lunatic Asylum at once, that Gabriel with great precipitation lifted him in his arms and carried him without delay from the tunnel. Once more in the open air, the energies of both men seemed to rally; Jack became as a mere feather in Gabriel's powerful arms, and even forgot his querulous opposition to being treated as a helpless child, while Gabriel trod the familiar banks of the ditch, climbed the long ascent and threaded the aisles of the pillared pines of Reservoir Hill with the free experienced feet of the mountaineer. Here Gabriel knew he was safe until daybreak, and gathered together some withered pine boughs and fragrant fine tassels for a couch for his helpless companion. And here, as he feared, fever set in; the respiration of the wounded man grew quick and hurried; he began to talk rapidly and incoherently, of Olly, of Ramirez, of the beautiful girl whose picture hung upon his breast, of Gabriel himself, and finally of a stranger who was, as it seemed to him, his sole auditor, the gratuitous coinage of his own fancy. Once or twice he raised his voice to a shout, and then, to Gabriel's great alarm, suddenly he began to sing, and, before Gabriel could place his hand upon his mouth, he had trolled out the verse of a popular ballad. The rushing river below them gurgled, beat its bars, and sang an accompaniment; the swaying pine sighed and creaked in unison; the patient stars above them stared and bent breathlessly, and then, to Gabriel's exalted consciousness, an echo of the wounded man's song arose from the gulch below. For a moment he held his breath with an awful mingling of joy and fear. Was he going mad too? or was it really the voice of little Olly? The delirious man beside him answered his query with another verse; the antiphonal response rose again from the valley. Gabriel hesitated no longer, but with feverish hands gathered a few dried twigs and pine cones into a pile, and touched a match to them. At the next moment they flashed a beacon to the sky, in another there was a crackling of the underbrush and the hurried onset of two figures, and before the slow Gabriel could recover from his astonishment, Olly flew, panting, to his arms, while her companion, the faithful Pete, sank breathlessly beside his wounded and insensible master. Olly was first to find her speech. That speech, after the unfailing instincts of her sex, in moments of excitement, was the instant arraignment of somebody else as the cause of that excitement, and at once put the whole universe on the defensive.

"Why didn't you send word where you was," she said impatiently, "and wot did you have it so dark for, and up a steep hill, and leavin' me lone at Wingdam, and why didn't you call without singin'?" And then Gabriel, after the fashion of his sex, ignored all but the present, and holding Olly in his arms, said: "It's my little girl, ain't it, come to her own brother Gabe! bless her!"

Whereat, Mr. Hamlin, after the fashion of lunatics of any sex, must needs be consistent, and break out again into song. "He's looney, Olly, what with fever along o' bein' shot in the leg a-savin' me, ez isn't worth savin'," explained Gabriel, apologetically. "It was him ez did the singin'." Then Olly, still following the feminine instinct, at once deserted conscious rectitude for indefensible error, and flew to Mr. Hamlin's side.


 * Copyright, 1875, by American Publishing Company. All rights reserved.