His mind at last had
reached the point where it was beginning to weaken.
"What on earth possessed you to do such a thing?" he whispered with the awe
of genuine terror in his voice and face.
I crossed round to his side of the fire. I took both his hands in mine,
kneeling down beside him and looking straight into his frightened eyes.
"We'll make one more blaze," I said firmly, "and then turn in for the
night. At sunrise we'll be off full speed for Komorn. Now, pull yourself
together a bit, and remember your own advice about not thinking fear!"
He said no more, and I saw that he would agree and obey. In some measure,
too, it was a sort of relief to get up and make an excursion into the
darkness for more wood. We kept close together, almost touching, groping
among the bushes and along the bank. The humming overhead never ceased, but
seemed to me to grow louder as we increased our distance from the fire. It
was shivery work!
We were grubbing away in the middle of a thickish clump of willows where
some driftwood from a former flood had caught high among the branches, when
my body was seized in a grip that made me half drop upon the sand. It was
the Swede. He had fallen against me, and was clutching me for support. I
heard his breath coming and going in short gasps.
"Look! By my soul!" he whispered, and for the first time in my experience I
knew what it was to hear tears of terror in a human voice. He was pointing
to the fire, some fifty feet away.
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