They had sought in vain for the lost man; and when in utter despair they
had been on the point of giving up the search, he had struggled back to
them, his last steps guided by the fire when he had felt that he must
lie down utterly exhausted, to die.
"Mr Brazier! At last!" cried Rob; and he went down upon his knee and
grasped his leader's hand, but there was no response, and the fingers he
held were cold as ice.
"Here, lend a hand, Mr Rob, sir," cried Shaddy roughly, "and help me to
get him on my back."
"Let me help carry him."
"No, sir; my way's easiest--quickest, and will hurt him least. He's
half dead of starvation, and cold as cold. Quick, sir! let's get him
down by the fire. It will be too dark in the hovel to do anything."
Rob helped to raise the wanderer, Shaddy swung him on his back lightly
and easily, and stepping quickly toward the fire, soon had the poor
fellow lying with his feet exposed to the blaze, while water was given
to him a little at a time, and soon after a few morsels of the tender
fish, which he swallowed with difficulty.
They had no rest that night, but, with the strange cries and noises of
the forest around them, mingled with the splashings and
danger-threatening sounds of the river, they tended and cared for the
insensible man, giving him food and water from time to time, but in
quantities suggestive of homoeopathic treatment. Still they felt no
fatigue for the great joy in both their hearts, for neither of them had
the faintest hope of ever seeing their leader again.
Once or twice during the night Mr Brazier had seemed so cold and rigid
that Rob had glanced wildly at the guide, who replied by feeling the
insensible man's feet.
"Only sleep, my lad!" he said softly. "I daresay he will not come to
for a couple of days. A man can't pass through the horror of being lost
without going off his head more or less."
"Do you think he'll be delirious, then?"
"Off his head, my lad? Yes. It will be almost like a fever, I should
say, and we shall have to nurse him a long time till he comes round."
The guide was quite right. The strong man was utterly brought down by
the terrible struggle of the past three days, and as they looked at his
hollow eyes and sunken cheeks it was plain to see what he had suffered
bodily from hunger, while his wanderings told of how great the shock
must have been to his brain.
The mystery of the blood was explained simply enough by his roughly
bandaged left arm, on which as they examined it, while he lay perfectly
weak and insensible, they found a severe wound cleanly cut by a knife.
"He must have been attacked, then," cried Rob as he looked at the wound
in horror, while in a quiet, methodical way Shaddy proceeded to sew it
together by the simple process of thrusting a couple of pins through the
skin and then winding a thread of silk round them in turn from head to
point, after which he firmly bandaged the wound before making a reply to
Rob's words.
"Yes, my lad," he said; "right arm attacked his left. He must have been
making a chop at some of the plants on a branch, and the tool slipped.
You take out his knife and open it, and see if it ain't marked."
Shaddy was quite right, for there on the handle were some dried-up
traces of how the wound must have bled.
It was a week before the patient began to show tokens of amendment,
during which time Rob and Shaddy had been hard pressed for ways to
supply his wants. There were endless things necessary for the invalid
which they could not supply, but, from old forest lore and knowledge
picked up during his adventurous life, the guide was able to find the
leaves of a shrub, which leaves he beat into a pulp between two pebbles,
put the bruised stems into the cup of a water flask, added water, and
gave it to the patient to drink.
"It is of no use to ask me what it is, Mr Rob, sir," said the guide;
"all I know is that the Indians use it, and that there isn't anything
better to keep down fever and get up strength."
"Then it must be quinine," said Rob.
"No, my lad; it isn't that, but it's very good. These wild sort of
people seem to have picked up the knack of doctoring themselves and of
finding out poisons to put on their arrows somehow or another, and
there's no nonsense about them."
The prisoners in the vast forest--for they were as much prisoners as if
shut up in some huge building--had to scheme hard to obtain their
supplies so as to make them suitable to their patient. Fish they
caught, as a rule, abundantly enough; birds they trapped and shot with
arrows; and fruit was to be had after much searching; but their great
want was some kind of vessel in which to cook, till after several
failures Rob built up a very rough pot of clay from the river bed by
making long thin rolls and laying one upon the other and rubbing them
together. This pot he built up on a piece of thin shaley stone, dried
it in the sun, and ended by baking it in the embers--covering it over
with the hot ashes, and leaving it all one night.
Shaddy watched him with a grim smile, and kept on giving him words of
encouragement, as he worked, tending Mr Brazier the while, brushing the
flies away and arranging green boughs over him to keep him in the shade,
declaring that he would be better out there in the open than in the
forest.
"Well done, my lad!" said the old sailor as Rob held up the finished pot
before placing it in the fire; "'tis a rough 'un, but I daresay there
has been worse ones made. What I'm scared about is the firing. Strikes
me it will crack all to shivers."
To Rob's great delight, the pot came out of the wood ashes perfectly
sound, and their next experiment was the careful stewing down of an
iguana and the production of a quantity of broth, which Shaddy
pronounced to be finer than any chicken soup ever made; Rob, after
trying hard to conquer his repugnance to food prepared from such a
hideous-looking creature, said it was not bad; and their patient drank
with avidity.
"There," said Shaddy, "we shall go on swimmingly in the kitchen now; and
as we can have hot water I don't see why we shouldn't have some tea."
"You'd better go to the grocer's, then, for a pound," said Rob, with a
laugh.
"Oh no, I shan't," said Shaddy; "here's plenty of leaves to dry in the
sun such as people out here use, and you'll say it ain't such bad tea,
neither; but strikes me, Mr Rob, that the sooner you make another pot
the better."
Rob set to at once, and failed in the baking, but succeeded admirably
with his next attempt, the new pot being better baked than the old, and
that night he partook of some of Shad's infusion of leaves, which was
confessed to be only wanting in sugar and cream to be very palatable.
That day they found a deer lying among the bushes, with the neck and
breast eaten, evidently the puma's work, and, after what Shaddy called a
fair division, the legs and loins were carried off to roast and stew,
giving the party, with the fruit and fish, a delightful change.
The next day was one to be marked with a red letter, for towards evening
Mr Brazier's eyes had in them the look of returned consciousness.
Rob saw it first as he knelt down beside his friend, who smiled at him
faintly, and spoke in quite a whisper.
From that hour he began to amend fast, and a week after he related how,
in his ardour to secure new plants, he had lost his bearings, and gone
on wandering here and there in the most helpless way, sustaining life on
such berries and other fruits as he could find, till the horror of his
situation was more than his brain could bear. Face to face with the
fact that he might go on wandering there till forced by weakness to lie
down and die, he said the horror mastered him all at once, and the rest
was like some terrible dream of going on and on, with intervals that
were full of delight, and in which he seemed to be amongst glorious
flowers, which he was always collecting, till the heaps crushed him
down, and all was horror, agony, and wild imagination. Then he awoke
lying beneath the bower of leaves, shaded from the sunshine, listening
to the birds, the rushing sound of the river, and, best of all, the
voices of his two companions.