He made me beat up the white of one of the eggs with
a little turpentine, which was probably, under the circumstances, the
best styptic for his malady within his reach. I lit his fire of peats,
undressed him, put him to bed, and made him as comfortable as might be in
the den which he had chosen. Then I went back to the shepherd's, sent a
messenger to the nearest doctor, and procured a kind of sledge, generally
used for dragging peat home, wherein, with abundance of blankets for
covering, I hoped to bring Allen back to the shepherd's cottage.
Not to delay over details, this was managed at last, and the unhappy
fellow was under a substantial roof. But he was very ill; he became
delirious and raved of many things--talked of old college adventures, bid
recklessly for imaginary books, and practised other eccentricities of
fever.
When his fever left him he was able to converse in a way--I talking, and
he scrawling faintly with a pencil on paper. I told him how his
character had been cleared, how he had been hunted for, advertised for,
vainly enough. To the shepherds' cottages where he had lived till the
beginning of that summer, newspapers rarely came; to his den in the old
secret still, of course they never came at all.
His own story of what he had been doing at the fatal hour when so many
people saw him at the auction-rooms was brief.
Pages:
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138