|The melodious voice referred to in the preceding chapter was owned and
operated by Geraldine Carboline O'Toole, the heroine of this classic
tale.
Anon she came down the valley like a thing of life.
The limber sunbonnet which she wore had drifted to leeward and revealed
her Grecian profile and peeled nose.
All at once her fawn-like eyes fell upon the prostrate figure, pale and
still, and its toes turned toward the center of the zodiac.
A wild, frightened look came into her starry eyes, and a ghastly pallor
overspread her young face, throwing her intellectual freckles into
strong relief.
She stole forward and looked at the pale face of Pumpkin Jim as it lay
upturned with the rosebud mouth slightly ajar, like the mouth of the
Mississippi river.
Then she stooped, and, dipping up some of the clear, cold water in his
hat, poured it into the rosy mouth. Slowly it trickled down his throat,
and the wild panic and surprise created in his stomach by the novel
fluid brought him speedily to consciousness.
"Where am I, and whence cometh this burning sensation in my liver?"
faintly murmured Pumpkin Jim. "Methought some new and peculiar beverage
didst cool my parching throat."
"Hist!" said Geraldine; "you must not excite yourself. You must brace
up. Everything depends upon your keeping quiet instead of tearing up the
ground with your broken rib."
"And whence comest thou, O beauteous vision, with the Aurora Borealis
hair?"
"Didst I not tell thee," said Geraldine, "that thou mustest not
converse, but remain quiet? Let it suffice, however, that I strayed
away from a Sabbath school picnic at Cheyenne, and have wandered on
carelessly for several hundred miles, wotting not whence I wist."
By this time the day god which we left gliding slowly adown the crimson
west, had glode down the crimson west according to advertisement, and
the solemn hush of night was coming on, broken anon by the long drawn
shriek of the mountain lion, or the pealing of the thunder, which also
reverberated anon through the otherwise solemn hush of night.
Darkness came on apace. It would be folly to attempt to prevent it, so
we will let it come on apace.