"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 quant.i.ty of broth, which Shaddy p.r.o.nounced 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.
CHAPTER THIRTY.
AN UNEXPECTED ENEMY.
Mr Brazier"s recovery took a month from the day of his regaining the balance of his reason, and even then he was weak; but he was about again, and, though easily fatigued, took his part in the many little duties they had to fulfil to sustain life in their forest prison. All thought of escape by their own efforts had been given up, and they had all taken the good course, roughly put by Shaddy as "making the best of things."
In fact, the horror and shock of their position had grown fainter, the loss of poor Giovanni a softened memory, and the cowardly desertion of the Indians with the boat a matter over which it was useless to murmur.
For the human mind is very plastic, and, if fully employed, soon finds satisfaction in its tasks.
It was so here. Every day brought its work, for the most part in glorious sunshine, and scarcely a night arrived without one of the three having something to announce in the way of discovery or invention for the amelioration of their lot.
"There is always the possibility of our being sought out and escaping,"
Mr Brazier said; "and in that hope I shall go on collecting, for the plants here are wonderful; and if I can get specimens home to England some day there will be nothing to regret."
In this spirit he went on as he grew stronger; and as for some distance inland in the triangle of miles, two of whose sides were the greater river and its tributary, they had formed so many faint trails in their hunting and fruit-seeking expeditions, the chances of being "bushed," as the Australians call it, grew fewer, plenty of collecting expeditions were made, at first in company with Shaddy and Rob, afterwards alone.
One evening a tremendous storm of wind and rain, with the accompaniments of thunder and lightning of the most awe-inspiring nature, gave them a lesson in the weakness of their shelter-place, for the water swept through in a deluge, and after a terrible night they gazed in dismay at the river, which was running swiftly nearly up to the place where they kept their fire going. That the flood was increasing they had not the slightest doubt, and it promised before long to be right over where they stood, fortunately now in the brilliant sunshine, which rapidly dried their clothes and gave them hope as well.
"We shall have to go inland and seek higher ground," Mr Brazier said at last.
"And where are you going to find it, sir?" said Shaddy rather gruffly.
"There"s high land away back on the far side of the river, but we can"t get there, and all out as far as I"ve been on this is one dead level.
Look yonder; there"s a lesson for us what to do if it gets much worse,"
he continued, pointing toward a great tree at the edge of the forest.
"Yes," said Rob as he watched a little flock of green-and-scarlet parrots circling round and perching in the upper branches, "but we have no wings, Shaddy."
"No, my lad, and never will have; but I didn"t mean that. Look a bit lower."
"Oh, you mean in that next tree. Ugh! how horrible!" cried Rob, with a shudder. "Has that been driven here by the water?"
"I don"t know what you"re talking about, sir. I mean that tree I pointed to. Look there in the fork."
"Yes; I can see it, Rob," said Mr Brazier. "It"s comfortably asleep.
We must do as it does. Not the first time an animal has given men a lesson."
Rob stared from one to the other as if wondering why they did not see with his eyes.
"Can"t you see it, Rob--your puma?"
"Eh? Oh yes, I see him now, but I meant in the other tree. Look! the great brute is all in motion. Why, it"s a perfect monster!"
"Phew!" whistled Shad; "I didn"t see it. Look, Mr Brazier, sir. That is something like a snake."
He pointed now to where a huge serpent was worming its way about the boughs of one of the trees in a slow, sluggish way, as if trying to find a spot where it could curl up and be at rest till the water, which had driven it from its customary haunts, had subsided.
"What shall we do, Shaddy?" whispered Rob. "Why, that must be nearly sixty feet long."
"It"s nearer two foot long, Mr Rob, sir. My word! how people"s eyes do magnify when they"re a bit scared."
"But it is a monstrously huge serpent," said Brazier, shading his eyes, as he watched the reptile.
"Yes, sir, and as nigh as one can judge, going round his loops and rings, a good five-and-twenty foot, and as big round as my thigh."