“She sent me out to get him, and I looked and looked. I came back and struck a track, wide like that,” measuring with his misshapen hands, “and blood on the bushes. At the top of the gully it stopped, and another track began, as if men had run--but light--with empty hands. And my cats whined and jumped down here. So I found him,” he answered simply. “It was not deep where he fell like it is here.” Andria looked at the high cliff over her head and thanked Heaven the man who did this thing had been in the hurry that comes of mortal fear. “You moved him here! How?” she cried, and Salome repeated her question. He took a stone and rolled it over and over. But it was lucky for Andria she understood only the pantomime, not the words that went with it. “I put him in the shade. Dead things bring flies in the sun, and I wanted him for my cats if she said I could have him. I went back to the house and called and called to ask her, but she never came.” “Shut your head!” said Salome furiously, but also, with prudence, in English. “We got to take him home,” she went on; “he may die there or he mayn’t, but we must carry him. No, you ain’t fit; you’d stumble. I’ll take de head, and dat ole feller can carry de feet. We’ll lift him in de blanket.” The old man nodded willingly enough when she explained, and Andria saw that it was even with alacrity that he lifted his end of the burden. She had reason to know his strength, yet she marveled at it in so miserable a body. Salome’s stout arms were tense, and her breath came hard as she moved steadily along; but the wizened man seemed to feel neither weight nor fatigue. Slowly and carefully the wretched procession reached the great white house that stood open in the desolate, red light of the sinking sun. Salome had seen wounds before, and it was as coolly as a hospital nurse that she did her poor best with this one. When she had done all she could she drew back and looked at Heriot lying on the wide, drawing-room sofa that must do duty for a bed, since it was impossible to carry him up-stairs. “Now you can give him de brandy--just a little taste,” she said. “It wasn’t no good to bring him to just to wrestle wid me and jar dem bones.” But even the brandy did not rouse him, since there was hardly any blood left in him. His eyelids flickered, and he swallowed; that was all. Yet Salome regarded him with a satisfied nod. He had begun to breathe better already. She waddled off to her kitchen to get something to eat, and sang hymns while she cooked, talking to herself with ludicrous effect between the verses. “Glory, glory in de shining sky!” she sang, and broke off between tears and laughter. “He meant to leave dem two fur de jaguars to eat alive, and he meant to put me in de sea, for I see it in his face. And he’s dead and gone and et himself! I’m free! I’m free!” and in the midst of her ecstasy she stopped short at the thought of the girl who was taken.