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The silence which followed that ejaculation was like the hush of earth before a thunder-storm.
Not a syllable passed the lips of the boys as they followed Herb into the log hut, but feeling seemed wagging a startled tongue in each finger-tip which convulsively pressed the rifles.
And not another articulate sentence came from the guide; only his throat swelled with a deep, amazed gurgle as he reached the interior of the shanty, and dropped his eyes upon the individual who raised that queer chanting.
On a bed of withered spruce boughs, strewn higgledy-piggledy upon the camp-floor—mother earth—lay the form of a man. Thin wisps of blue-black hair, long untrimmed, trailed over his face and neck, which looked as if they were carved out of yellow bone. His figure was skeleton-like. His lips—the lips which at the entrance of the strangers never ceased their wild crooning—were swollen and fever-scorched. His black eyes, disfigured by a hideous squint, rolled with the sick fancies of delirium.
Cyrus and the Farrars, while they looked upon him, felt that, even if they had never heard Herb's exclamation, they would have had no difficulty in identifying the creature, remembering that story which had thrilled them by the camp-fire at Millinokett. It was Herb Heal's traitor chum—the half-breed, Cross-eyed Chris.
And Herb, backing off from the withered couch as far as the limited space of the cabin would allow, stood with his shoulders against the mouldy logs of the wall, his eyes like peep-holes to a volcano, gulping and gurgling, while he swallowed back a fire of amazed excitement and defeated anger, for which his backwoods vocabulary was too cheap.
A flame seemed scorching and hissing about his heart while he remembered that during some hour of every day for five years, since last he had seen the "hound" who robbed him, he had sworn that, if ever he caught the thief, he would pounce upon him with a woodsman's vengeance.
"I couldn't touch him now—the scum! But I'll be switched if I'll do a thing to help him!" he hissed, the flame leaping to his lips.
Yet he had a strange sensation, as if that vow was broken like an egg-shell even while he made it. He knew that "the two creatures which had fought inside of him, tooth and claw," about the fate of his enemy, were pinching his heart by turns in a last hot conflict.
His eyes shot flinty sparks; he drew his breath in hard puffs; his knotted throat twitched and swelled, while they (the man and the brute) strove within him; and all the time he stood staring in grisly silence at the half-breed.
The latter still continued his Indian croon; though from the crazy roll of his malformed eyes it was plain that he knew not whether he chanted about the stars, his old friends and guides, or about anything else in heaven or earth.
But one thing quickly became clear to Cyrus, and then to the Farrar boys,—less accustomed to tragedy than their comrade,—that this strange personage, in whose veins the blood of white men and red men met, carrying in its turbid flow the weaknesses of two races, was singing his swan-song, the last chant he would ever raise on earth.
At their first entrance, as their bodies interfered with the broad light streaming through the cabin-door, Chris had lifted towards them a scared, shrinking stare. But, apparently, he took them for the shadows which walked in the dreams of his delirium. Not a ray of recognition lightened the blankness of that stare as Herb's big figure passed before him. Letting his eyes wander aimlessly again from log wall to log wall, from withered bed to mouldy rafters, his lips continued their crooning, which sank with his weakening breath, then rose again to sink once more, like the last wind-gusts when the storm is over.
Suddenly his shrunken body shivered in every limb. The humming ceased. His yellow teeth tapped upon each other in trouble and fear. He raised himself to a squatting posture, with his knee-bones to his chin, the wisps of hair tumbling upon his naked chest.
"It's dark—heap dark!" he whimpered, between long gasps. "Can't strike the trail—can't find the home-camp. Herb—Herb Heal—ole pard—'twas I took 'em—the skins. 'Twas—a dog's trick. Take it out—o' my hide—if yer wants to—yah! Heap sick!"
Not a ray of sense was yet in the half-breed's eyes. An imaginary, vengeance-dealing Herb was before him; but he never turned a glance towards the real, and now forgiving, old chum, who leaned against the wall not ten feet away. His voice dropped to a guttural rumble, in which Indian sounds mingled with English.
But the flame at Herb's heart was quenched at the first whimpered word. His stiffened muscles and lips relaxed. With a gurgle of sorrow, he crossed the camp-floor, and dropped into a crawling position on the faded spruces.
"Chris!" he cried thickly. "Chris,—poor old pard,—don't ye know me? Look, man! Herb is right here—Herb Heal, yer old chum. You're 'heap sick' for sure; but we'll haul you off to a settlement or to our camp, and I'll bring Doc along in two days. He'll"—
But Cross-eyed Chris became past hearing, his flicker of strength had failed; he keeled over, and lay, with his limp legs curled up, faint and speechless, upon the dead evergreens.
"You ain't a-going to die!" gasped Herb defiantly. "I'll be jiggered if you be, jest as I've found you! Say, boys! Cyrus! Neal! rub him a bit, will ye? We ain't got no brandy, I'll build a fire, and warm some coffee."
It was strange work for the hands of the Bostonian, and stranger yet for those of young Farrar,—son of an English merchant-prince,—this straightening and rubbing of a dying half-Indian, a "scum," as Herb called him, drunkard, and thief. Yet there was no flash of hesitation on Farrar's part, as they brought their warm friction to bear upon the chill yellow skin, piebald from dirt and the stains of travel, as if it were the very mission which had brought them to Katahdin.
They had grave thoughts meanwhile that the old mountain was decidedly gloomy in its omens, first a thunder-storm and then a tragedy; for, rub as they might with brotherly hands, they could not pass their own warmth into the body of the half-breed, though he still lived.
But the mountain had not ended its terrors yet.
Its mumbling lips began to speak, with a threatening, low at first like muttered curses, but swelling into a nameless noise—a rumbling, pounding, creeping, crashing.
"Great Governor's Ghost! what's that?" gasped Cyrus, stopping his rubbing. "Pamolah or some other fiend seems to be bombarding us from the top now."
"It's more thunder rolling over us," said Neal; but as he spoke his tongue turned stiff with fear.
"Sounds as if the whole mountain was tumbling to pieces. Perhaps it's the end of the world," suggested Dol, as a succession of booming shocks from above seemed to shake the camping-ground under his feet.
There was one second of awful indecision. The boys looked at each other, at the dying man, at the roof above them, in the stiffness of uncertain terror.
Then a figure leaped into their midst, with an armful of dry sticks, which he dashed from him. It was Herb, with the fuel for a fire. And, for the first and last time in his history, so far as these friends of his knew it, there was that big fear in his face which is most terrible when it looks out of the eyes of a naturally brave man.
"Boys, where's yer senses?" he yelled cuttingly. "Out, for your lives! Run! There's a slide above us on the mountain!"
"Him?" questioned Cyrus's stiff lips, as he pointed to the breathing wreck on the spruce boughs. "He's not dead yet."
"D'ye think I'd leave him? Clear out of this camp—you, or we'll be buried in less'n two minutes! To the right! Off this ridge! Got yer rifles? I'm coming!"
The woodsman flung out the words while his brawny arms hoisted the body of his old chum. His comrades had already disappeared when he turned and sprang for the camp-door with his limp burden, but his moccasined foot kicked against something.
A great hiccough which was almost a sob rose from Herb's throat. It was his one valuable possession, his 45-90 Winchester rifle, his second self, which he had rested against the log wall.
"Good-by, Old Blazes!" he grunted. "You never went back on me, but I can't lug him and you! My stars! but that was a narrow squeak."
For, as he cleared the camping-ground with a blind dash, with head bent and tongue caught between his clenched teeth, with a boom like a Gatling gun, a great block of granite from the summit of Katahdin struck the rock which sheltered the old camp, breaking a big piece off it, and shot on with mighty impetus down the mountain.
An avalanche of loose earth, stones, and bushes, brought down by this battering-ram of the landslide, piled themselves upon the log hut, smashing to kindling-wood its walls, which had stood many a hard storm, burying them out of sight, and flinging wide showers of dust and small missiles.
A scattered rain of clay caught Herb upon the head, and lodged, some of it, on the little pack containing axe and lunch which was strapped upon his shoulders.
He shook. His grip loosened. The limp, dragging body in his arms sank until the feet touched the earth.
But with the supreme effort, moral and physical, of his life, the forest guide gathered it tight again.
"I'll be blowed if I'll drop him now," he gasped. "He ain't nothing but a bag o' bones, anyhow."
Only a strong man in the hour of his best strength could have done it. With a defiant snort Herb charged through the choking dust-clouds, pelted by flying pebbles, sods, and fragments of sticks.
"This way, boys!" he roared, after five straining, staggering minutes, as he caught a glimpse of his comrades ahead, tearing off to the right, as he had bidden them. "You may let up now. We're safe enough."
They faced back, and saw him make a few reeling, descending steps, then lay what now seemed to be an out-and-out lifeless man on a bed of moss beneath a dwarfed spruce.
The nerves of the three were in a jumping condition, their brains felt befuddled, and their hearts sinking and melting in the midst of their bones, from the astounding shock and terror of the land-slide. But, as they beheld the guide deposit his burden, with its helplessly trailing head and limbs, a cheer in unsteady tones rang above the slackening rattle of earth and stones, and the far-away boom of the granite-block as it buried itself in the forest beneath.
"Hurrah! for you, Herb, old boy," yelled Cyrus triumphantly. "That was the grittiest thing I ever saw done' Hurrah! Hurrah! Hoo-ray!"
The English boys, open-throated, swelled the peal.
But their cheering broke off as they came near, and saw the mask-like face over which Herb bent.
"Is he gone, poor fellow?" asked Garst. "What do you suppose caused it—the slide?"
"Why, it was a thundering big lump of granite from the top o' the mountain," answered Herb, replying to the second question. "That plaguy heavy rain must ha' loosened the earth around it the clay and bushes that kep' it in place. So it got kind o' top-heavy, and came slumping and pitching down, slow at first, and then a'most as quick as a cannon-ball, bringing all that pile along with it. I've seen the like before; but, sho! I never came so near being buried by it."
He pointed as he spoke to the late camping-ground, with its lodgment of clay, sods, pygmy trees, and pieces of rock, big and little.
"Herb Charged Through The Choking Dust-Clouds."
"Herb Charged Through The Choking Dust-Clouds."
"The old camp's clean wiped out, boys," he said; "and I guess one of the men that built it is gone, or a'most gone, too. Stick your arm under his head, Cyrus, while I hunt for some water."
Garst did as he was bidden, but his help was not needed long. The guide went off like a racer, covering the ground at a stretching gallop. He remembered well the clear Katahdin spring, which had supplied the home-camp during that long-past trapping winter. He returned with his tin mug full.
When the ice-cold drops touched Chris's forehead, and lay on his parted lips, gem-like drops which he was past swallowing, his malformed eyes slowly opened. There was intelligence in them, shining through the gathering death-film, like a sinking light in a lantern.
He was groping in the dim border-land now, and in it he recognized his old partner with shadowy wonder; for delirium was past, with the other storms of a storm-beaten life.
"Herb," he gurgled in snatches, the words being half heard, half guessed at, "'twas I—took 'em—the skins—an' the antlers. I wanted—to get—to the ole camp—an' let you—take it out o' me—afore I—keeled over."
Herb had taken Cyrus's place, and was upholding him with a tenderness which showed that the guide's heart was in this hour melted to a jelly. Two tears were dammed up inside his eyelids, which were so unused to tears that they held them in. He neither wiped nor winked them away before he answered:—
"Don't you fret about that—poor kid. We'll chuck that old business clean out o' mind. You've jest got to suck this water and try to chipper up, and—we'll make camp together again."
But Herb knew as well as he knew anything that the man who had robbed him was long past "chippering up," and was starting alone to the unseen camping-grounds.
"How long since you got back here?" he' asked, close to the dulling ear.
"Couldn't—keep—track—o' days. Got—turned—round—in woods. Lost—trail—heap—long—getting—to—th' old—camp."
The words seemed freezing on the lips which uttered them. Herb asked no more questions. Silence was broken only by the rolling voice of the land-slide, which had not yet ceased. Occasional volleys of loose earth and stones, dislodged or shaken by the down-plunging granite, still kept falling at intervals on the buried camp.
At one unusually loud rattle, Chris's lips moved again. In those strange gutturals which the boys had heard in the hut, he rumbled an Indian sentence, repeating it in English with scared, breaking breaths.
It was a prayer of her tribe which his mother had taught him to say at morning and eve:—
"God—I—am—weak—Pity—me!"
"Heap—noise! Heap—dark!" he gasped. "Can't—find—th' old—camp."
"You're near it now, old chum," said Herb, trying to soothe him. "It's the home-camp."
"We'll—camp—to-ge-ther?"
"We will again, sure."
The last stone pounded down on the heap above the old camp; and Herb gently laid flat the body of the man he had sworn to shoot, closed the malformed eyes, and turned away, that the fellows he was guiding might not see his face.