Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/81

 "If your clothes are dry," his nurse consented, and gave him a hand.

"Gosh!" groaned the man, for again there was a chariot race of pain in the back of his head. "I must have got an awful whack!"

Henry found her frame as strong as steel and sturdy as a column as she half-lifted him to his feet and steadied his steps toward the couch of skins. As he balanced experimentally upon his legs, he caught sight through one of the narrow windows of the snow cap of Mount Gregory far in the distance, floating on a haze of mist.

"You put your window where you could see that?" he beamed, pointing to the hoary mountain that to him was like a friend.

The girl nodded. "For a thousand years those snows have fed the streams where my people fished and hunted," she said. "For a thousand years that mountain has been God to them. For a thousand it shall be God to me."

There was something infinitely old in the maiden's face as she made this mystical affirmation; and Harrington stared at her wonderingly. Her manner was not only cryptic; there was in it an odd suggestion of the occult. Perhaps it was the perception of this which impelled Henry suddenly to unburden himself of that central knot of interrogations which jangled so painfully in his mind that he had shrunk from uttering them.

"Perhaps you know just what happened to me," he blurted. "How I got in the water . . . who it was that pulled me out—and—all the rest."

"You fell into the water, I think; or were knocked