"Are--you--there?" The girl's voice came low from the blackness.
"Yes," he replied, and was conscious that his laboring breast
made speech difficult.
"Are we--in a cave?"
"Yes."
"Oh, listen!...The waterfall!...I hear it! You've brought me
back!"
Venters heard a murmuring moan that one moment swelled to a pitch
almost softly shrill and the next lulled to a low, almost
inaudible sigh.
"That's--wind blowing--in the--cliffs," he panted. "You're far
from Oldring's--canyon."
The effort it cost him to speak made him conscious of extreme
lassitude following upon great exertion. It seemed that when he
lay down and drew his blanket over him the action was the last
before utter prostration. He stretched inert, wet, hot, his body
one great strife of throbbing, stinging nerves and bursting
veins. And there he lay for a long while before he felt that he
had begun to rest.
Rest came to him that night, but no sleep. Sleep he did not want.
The hours of strained effort were now as if they had never been,
and he wanted to think. Earlier in the day he had dismissed an
inexplicable feeling of change; but now, when there was no longer
demand on his cunning and strength and he had time to think, he
could not catch the illusive thing that had sadly perplexed as
well as elevated his spirit.
Above him, through a V-shaped cleft in the dark rim of the cliff,
shone the lustrous stars that had been his lonely accusers for a
long, long year.
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