The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of Colorado — John Shaqi
The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of ColoradoBrady, Cyrus Townsend
General
The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of Colorado
Brady, Cyrus Townsend
Colorado -- Fiction; Love stories; Western stories
He bent to the woman again. What he saw can hardly be described. Her
right arm and her left leg were bent backward and under her. They were
shattered, evidently. He was afraid to examine her and yet he knew that
practically every other bone in her body was broken as well. Her head
fell lower than her shoulders, the angle which she made with the uneven
rock on which she lay convinced him that her back was broken too. Her
clothing was rent by her contact with the rocky spur above, it was torn
from the neck downward, exposing a great red scar which ran across her
sweet white young breast, blood oozing from it, while in the middle of
it something yellow and bright gleamed in the light. Her cheek was cut
open, her glorious hair, matted, torn and bloody, was flung backward
from her down-thrown head.
She should have been dead a thousand times, but she yet lived, she
breathed, her ensanguined bosom rose and fell. Through her pallid lips
bloody foam bubbled, she was still alive.
The man must do something. He did not dare to move her body, yet he took
off his hat, folded it, lifted her head tenderly and slipped it
underneath; it made a better pillow than the hard rock, he thought. Then
he tore his handkerchief from his neck and wiped away the foam from her
lips. In his pocket he had a flask of whiskey, a canteen of water that
hung from his shoulder somehow had survived the rough usage of the
rocks. He mingled some of the water with a portion of the spirit in the
cup of the flask and poured a little down her throat. Tenderly he took
his handkerchief again, and wetting it laved her brow. Except to mutter
incoherent prayers again and again he said no word, but his heart was
filled with passionate endearments, he lavished agonized and infinite
tenderness upon her in his soul.
By and by she opened her eyes. In those eyes first of all he saw
bewilderment, and then terror and then anguish so great that it cannot
be described, pain so horrible that it is not good for man even to think
upon it. Incredible as it may seem, her head moved, her lips relaxed,
her set jaw unclenched, her tongue spoke thickly.
"God!" she said.
The same word that he had used, that final word that comes to the lips
when the heart is wrung, or the body is racked beyond human endurance.
The universal testimony to the existence of the Divine, that trouble and
sometimes trouble alone, wrings from man. No human name, not even his,
upon her lips in that first instant of realization!
"How I--suffer," she faltered weakly.
Her eyes closed again, the poor woman had told her God of her condition,
that was all she was equal to. Man and human relationships might come
later. The man knelt by her side, his hands upraised.
"Louise," he whispered, "speak to me."
Her eyes opened again.
"Will," the anguished voice faltered on, "I am--broken--to pieces--kill
me. I can't stand--kill me"--her voice rose with a sudden fearful
appeal--"kill me."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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