Emerson's Wife and Other Western StoriesKelly, Florence Finch
General
Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories
Kelly, Florence Finch
Western stories
So they desisted and left him wrapped in the skin and tied to a tree
near the cabin door. There he constantly walked back and forth on all
fours, the length of his rope, restlessly and in silence, as caged
animals do. If any one approached too near he sprang at the intruder
with a savage growl and a snap of his jaws. But otherwise he paid
no attention to any of those who had expected to be his guests. He
refused to eat, unless they offered him acorns or dry oak leaves.
These he devoured voraciously.
There was some scrawled writing on the scraps of paper I had pieced
together and the Artist and I made out some disjointed sentences. We
agreed that the lunatic must have written them himself, in the first
beclouding of his mind, and we thought the words might have some
effect upon him. So we went out to where the poor, crazed creature
was tied, and, looking him squarely in the eyes, the Artist spoke very
slowly:
"Dorothy. Dorothy. She said I am a bear. Where is Dorothy?"
He stopped and stared and a puzzled, human look came into his eyes.
He rose slowly to his feet and stood upright, leaning against the
tree. For the moment he forgot his bearskin covering and it half
fell off. He stared at us, mumbling strange sounds, which presently
became incoherent words of human speech. But he spoke thickly and
uncertainly, like one long unused to the sound of his voice:
"Where is--Dorothy? I want--she said--Dorothy--Dorothy--she said--I
--a bear--I--I--am--a bear."
Then he dropped to all fours again and drew his bearskin closely
about him and that was the last flicker of human intelligence that he
showed.
The next morning the men made a small platform of some loose boards to
which they tied the lunatic. He fought desperately against his bonds,
and it required the combined strength of all the men of the party to
fasten him securely to the platform. Then the guide improvised a
harness of ropes and hitched to this primitive sled the horse which he
himself rode. Watching the poor creature closely, our little party
went slowly back to the Valley, whence he was sent to an asylum. The
Artist wrote to Mrs. Moulton an account of his condition, and told her
also its probable cause.
Some months afterward I went to the asylum, purposely to learn what
had become of him. The physician said his mental condition was
steadily improving, that there was a pretty sure prospect of his
recovery, and that he would probably be sane all the rest of his
life, if--and the doctor put a significant emphasis upon that little
word--"if he lives as a sane man should, among men, and busies himself
as other men do."
Then the man of healing took from a shelf a book and read to me the
words which I have put at the beginning of this account.
He told me also that Mrs. Moulton was there, that she had been there
almost from the first, and that she spent all the time with the
unfortunate man that the physicians would allow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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