In the Shadow of the HillsShedd, George C. (George Clifford)
General
In the Shadow of the Hills
Shedd, George C. (George Clifford)
Fiction
"You remain here and I'll go find out."
He led her into the cabin and to a stool by the table, where resting
her elbows on the board she pressed her hands over her eyes as if to
blot out the sight she had just witnessed. After all she had suffered,
the climax of this dreadful spectacle left her unnerved, weak,
shuddering.
"Don't stay long," she whispered. "Come back as quick as you can. This
cabin, this whole spot in the mountains, is awful. I can almost feel
him hovering over me."
"You mustn't permit such thoughts." He gave her shoulder an
encouraging pat. "It will take but a few minutes to see if he's still
alive and then we'll start home. You've been the bravest girl going
and will continue to be, I know. Everything is over; nothing can
happen to you now."
Weir went out. He perceived that the wrecked car was fully afire by
this time, its flames illuminating the granite ledge and the ground
about. Evidently the machine's fuel tank had been smashed under the
impact and the gasoline had escaped, preventing an explosion but
fiercely feeding the blaze. He ran towards the place.
At first he did not find Sorenson, so that he supposed him buried
beneath the wreckage, but presently he discovered his crumpled form
lying jammed between the base of the ledge and a boulder. Weir lifted
the limp figure from its resting place and bore it to open ground,
where he made an examination of the still form. Clearly Sorenson had
been pitched free of the car and crushed against the rock wall. His
cap was missing; his coat was ripped up the back and a part of it gone
as if caught and held by some obstruction in the car when he had been
shot forth; blood and a great bruise marked one cheek; and the way his
legs dragged when he was lifted up indicated some serious injury to
those members. But the man still breathed.
"Miracles haven't ceased," Weir muttered, when he had made sure of the
fact. "But his chance is slim at best."
It would be false to say that the engineer felt compassion at the
other's sudden catastrophe; he experienced none. On the contrary he
had a sense of justice fittingly executed, as if, escaping bullets and
man's blows, Sorenson had been felled by a more certain power, by the
inevitable consequences of his own deeds and sins, by a wall of evil
he himself had raised as much as by a wall of stone.
He searched the man's breast pocket, then hunted for the missing
document among the stones and bushes. At last he gave up for the time
further seeking, with a conviction that the vital paper was gone for
good, destroyed in the fire of the burning car. But for his own
over-confidence, his belief he had Sorenson a safe prisoner back there
in the cabin, the sheets might be secure in his pocket. Well, it was
too late now.
He again lifted the unconscious man in his arms and returned to the
log house. Inside he laid him on the rude bed which Sorenson himself
had spread with sheets and blankets.
"He's alive?" Janet asked, awed.
"Alive, but badly hurt."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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