The stranger had talked them into a belief in his intelligence being superior to that of the guide; and they consented to the two setting out together to make a second attempt to find the way to the fort. In a condition so hopeless it seemed to matter very little what they did. Anything was better than sitting, arms folded, as the stranger had said, face to face with death. But Lucius was now chained to the hut by a new tie. The day after the Indian’s return, Geoffrey, the light-hearted, the fearless, had been struck down with fever. Lucius had henceforward no care so absorbing as that which bound him to the side of his friend. The German looked on, phlegmatic but not unsympathising, and made no moan. ‘I shall gatch ze fefer aftervarts, no tout,’ he said, ‘and you vill have dwo do nurse. Hart ubon you.’ CHAPTER V. ‘O, THAT WAY MADNESS LIES.’ The fever raged severely. Delirium held Geoffrey’s brain in its hideous thraldom. Horrid sights and scenes pursued him. He looked at his friend’s face with blank unseeing eyes, or looked and beheld something that was not there—the countenance of an enemy. Lucius felt himself now between two fires—disease on one side, famine on the other. Between these two devastators death seemed inevitable. Absalom Schanck, sorely wasted from his native plumpness, sat by the hearth and watched the struggle, resigned to the idea of his own approaching end. Geoffrey’s illness reduced them to a far worse situation than they had been in before, since he was their chief sportsman, and had done much to ward off starvation. Lucius took his gun out for a couple of hours every morning, leaving the invalid in Absalom’s charge, and prowled the forest in search of game. But with the exception of one solitary marten, whose tainted flesh had been revolting even to their hunger, his wanderings had been barren of everything but disappointment. Matchi and the guide had been gone a week, when Lucius set out one morning more desperate than usual, hunger gnawing his entrails, and worse than hunger, a fear that weighed upon his heart like lead—the fear that before many days were gone Geoffrey Hossack would have set forth upon a longer and a darker journey than that they two had started upon together, in the full flush of youth and hope, a year and a half ago. He could not conceal from himself that his friend was in imminent danger—that unless the fever, for which medicine could do so little, abated speedily, all must soon be over. Nor could he conceal from himself another fact—namely, that the stores he had doled out with such a niggard hand would not yield even that scanty allowance for twenty-four hours longer. A sorry frame of mind in which to stalk buffalo or chase the moose!