"Nay, lad--nay!" I coaxed him, but slipped a hand under him as he insisted and sat upright. "She needs help, I tell you," he gasped. "Needs help . . . it was for help I ran when--when--" "But what dreaming is this? My dear fellow, she makes prisoners of us, shoots you down when you try to escape, treats me worse than a dog, banishes us to this hut which--not to put too fine a point on it--is a pigs'-sty, and particularly filthy at that. I don't blame her, though some little explanation might not come amiss: but if she has any need of help, you must admit that she dissembles it pretty thoroughly." Nat would not listen. "You did not see? You did not see?--And yet you know her language and have talked with her! Whereas I--O blind!" he broke out passionately, "blind that you could not see!" A fit of coughing seized and shook him, and as I eased him back upon his fern pillow, blood came away upon the handkerchief I held to his lips. "Damn her!" I swore viciously. "Let her need help if she will, and let her ask me for it! She has tried her best to kill you; and what's more, she'll succeed if you don't lie still as I order. Help? Oh yes, I'll help her--when I have helped _you!_" He moved his head feebly, as if to shake it: but lay quiet, panting, with closed eyes: and so, the effusion of blood having ceased, I left him and fell to work like a negro slave. By the angle of the hut there stood a pigs' trough of granite, roughly hewn and hollowed, and among the tools within I found a leaky wooden bucket which, by daubing it with mud from the brink of the stream, I contrived to make passably watertight. A score of times I must have travelled to and fro between the hut and the stream before I had the cistern filled. Then I fell-to upon the foul walls within, slushing and brooming them. Bats dropped from the roof and flew blundering against me: I drove them forth from the window. The mud floor became a quag: I seized a spade and shovelled it clean, mud and slime and worse filth together. And still as I toiled a song kept liddening (as we say in Cornwall) through my head: a song with two refrains, whereof the first was the old nursery jingle--"Mud won't daub sieve, sieve won't hold water, water won't wet stone, stone won't edge axe, axe won't cut rod, rod won't make a gad, a gad to hang Manachar who has eaten my raspberries every one." (So ran the rigmarole with which Mrs. Nance had beguiled my infancy.) The second refrain echoed poor Nat's cry, "She needs help, needs help, and you could not see! Blind, blind, that you could not see!" How should she need help? Little cared I though she needed it, and sorely! But how had the notion taken hold of Nat? Weakness? Delirium? No: he had been running to get help for her when they shot him down. I had his word for that. . . . But she had pursued with the others. For aught I knew, she herself had fired the shot.