what had become of henry?
the ball had struck him in a tender place; and not seriously hurt, but very much frightened, he fell headlong with a groan of—fear!
while the demon was carrying off will he lay still and made use of his wits.
he reflected logically as follows: “whatever will loaded my pistols with, it certainly wasn’t a genuine bullet![179] so it would be useless for me to fire this pistol at the demon—useless—wicked—and against the laws!”
gentle reader, mark that; read it carefully two or three times; muse on it; and remember that you yourself were once a boy—or, if not, your father was.
“oh, how my side smarts! there’ll be a blister, surely!” henry groaned. “well, the best way to help will will be to lie here perfectly still till the demon gets entirely out of sight, and then hop up and scramble away. where shall i go? to the road? i must look for help somewhere, or will may be killed! it won’t do to yell for help here, for no one except the demon could hear me. yes, i must keep still a little while!”
as soon as the demon was well out of sight, henry arose. but he found himself more bruised than he had thought.
“now, to save will—and myself,” he muttered. “what a capital idea,” he chuckled, as a happy thought struck him. “they think i’m dead, very likely, and so the demon won’t be on the watch for me! of course; and if i can’t get help, i’ll swoop down on him and do the rescuing myself.”
as fast as he could he went back to the path, thinking to climb the hill and hurry to the road. a lingering fear that the demon might return and look for him lent speed to his feet, and he walked with long swift steps. in his generous heart he resolved to liberate will at all hazards; and if he could devise no other means of doing so, he would return and “beard the lion in his den.”
when he reached the foot of the hill he chanced to look back, and saw a man standing by the tree. it was the demon, looking for him. to his intense relief, the man turned and went slowly back towards the cave.
“i am safe now,” he thought. “he won’t come to look for me again. but does he think i am dead, or carried off? well, at any rate he will see me before long!”
eagerly he turned to climb the hill, thinking meanwhile:—“poor will! no telling what that cruel demon may do with him! oh, dear! we are both in a very bad scrape! o my pistols!—i must hurry!”
[180]
what with scrambling up hills and rushing down them, henry’s limbs were already becoming stiff, and he found it hard work to climb. he succeeded, after making great and desperate struggles, in getting nearly to the top of the hill; when he took a false step, slipped, was thrown off his feet, and—in spite of all his efforts to save himself—slid headlong down to the very bottom. an avalanche of stones and dirt thundered down in his train.
a little mound of earth brought him to a standstill, and a cry of pain escaped his lips.
in spite of the pain he suffered, his first words were characteristic of him. “well,” he said, grimly, “i’ve blotted out the demons path up that hill! his nice little path is now in ruins in this valley!”
but, with a groan of agony, he ejaculated: “oh! my foot is broken all to pieces! oh! o—o—h!”
for a little time it was difficult for him to keep from screaming with the pain.
as soon as he felt a little better, he took off his boot and stocking, and carefully examined the injured foot, muttering meanwhile between his groans: “oh, i hope the demon didn’t hear that noise! how the stones rattled and thundered! if he heard, he will come rushing out to attack me, and i am not able to help myself a bit! oh, what a catastrophe this is!”
poor henry! that time-honored accident, which, in romance, befalls all heroes of the chase, had befallen him. “he had sprained his ankle!”
only, in this instance, no lovely huntress was to find him, and have him tenderly conveyed to her dwelling. no sporting companions were with him, hastily to construct a litter, and smuggle him into the castle of some incarcerated maiden, whom, making light of his suffering, he would release from her “turret prison;” and then, drawing the wicked jailer—her scheming, hunch-backed uncle—out of his concealment, he would fall upon him, and slay him, without mercy.
no; no love-marriage was fated to result from that adventure; henry was to lie there all alone; and suffer.
it was sad, but our hero bore it patiently and philosophically.[181] he believed that he should not be molested by the demon, and that was some consolation. but will? alas! all hope of rescuing him, so far as henry was concerned, was at an end. that grieved him more than anything else.
slowly the time wore away. as the demon did not come out again, henry thought that the noise made by the falling stones had not been heard in the cave. he was full of anxious and remorseful thoughts for himself as well as for his cousin; and, much as he revolved the affair in his mind, he could hit upon no feasible plan of deliverance.
“if i had only told our folk where we were going,” he reflected, “they would hunt for us when they find us missing. but now they will be uneasy, and not know where on earth we are! no; they won’t have the slightest clue to track us! oh, dear! what is going to become of us? how is this spree to end? what about my ankle? what on earth! well, now are we to stay here all night? will in the cave, and i here? ‘so near, and yet so far!’ my stars! i’ve read that in stories, but i never guessed what it meant! ‘so near, and yet so far!’ the man that wrote those words knew more than i ever shall, anyway! oh! what will the demon do to poor will?”
henry could reason logically, and now, as well as his aching ankle would permit, he reviewed the whole scheme of visiting the demon’s cave. in the light he now had it seemed very foolish, whichever way he looked at it.
“it was a humbug,” he acknowledged to himself; “but after all it is just what all heroes do, and i don’t see why we should not have managed it better.”
his sprained ankle pained him intensely; he began to feel the effects of his involuntary ride down hill; the place where the “bullet” struck him smarted and itched in a manner to make him writhe. in a word, he was miserable in both body and mind.
he reverted to the scene of conflict! “what could have been wrong with that pistol?” he asked himself angrily. “something struck me—but what? certainly,[182] not a bullet. my father says that a big dose of powder will drive almost anything hard and solid into the flesh. now, this struck me, and hurt me; but it didn’t punch a hole through my vest. well, if i could only unload this other pistol, i should know to a certainty.—what became of the pistol will fired? if he carried it off with him, he may suddenly scare the demon out of his wits!—now, i wonder whether will loaded my pistols wrong on purpose!—well, this is rum old sport, sitting here like a dying gladiator, and not able to turn over for fear of howling with pain! no; i can’t budge from this spot!—botheration! i won’t take will to see any more curiosities!—surely, the demon won’t hurt him!”
thus the boy continued, speaking disjointed sentences just as the spirit moved him.
as no help came to him, he, the irrepressible, began to despond. it seemed to him that death only would come to his release. suddenly, he thought of the glass ink bottle hidden behind “robinson crusoe” in his drawer. he dwelt on it for the space of three minutes, and then, between a sigh and a groan, he said: “i wish i knew whether she would care if i should die here—alone, and in pain! would she be sorry, or would she go to school as light-hearted as ever, and let some other boy sharpen her pencil? i wonder whether she would borrow johnny jones’ history! oh! how i despise that boy! i wish i could see him leave the country! i wish now that i had given her my history out and out; that would keep my memory green in her eyes.”
now, as henry seldom or never soared higher than comparison,—to make our meaning clearer, as he was not in the habit of apostrophizing his treasured glass ink-bottle as an animated being of the feminine gender,—we must conclude that the veil is lifted from a romance in his life.
do not laugh at him, reader; his woes were actual. in fact, we venture to assert that every member of the sterner sex, from the age of sixteen or seventeen till he is happily married, if he has any feeling, any heart, any soul, suffers more or less acutely from jealousy of a rival, real or imaginary.
[183]
after a time the moon came out, and dimly lighted up the valley. henry was not afraid of goblins; and in sheer desperation he resolved to wait doggedly till something should happen.
notwithstanding all his woes, he began to feel hungry. then he recollected that he had set out with a knapsack of sandwiches slung over his shoulder.
“it will amuse me, and turn my wandering thoughts into a different channel,” he muttered, as he felt for the knapsack.
alas! in sliding down hill his knapsack had been torn into ribbons, so that the carefully prepared sandwiches were strewn along the hillside.
his thoughts were “turned into a different channel;” but he was not very much “amused.”
in this way, the time passed with henry. he could not, or would not, make an effort to move from the heap of earth which had arrested his downward course.
having thus disposed of him, how did it fare with will?
when the demon re-entered the cave, he, according to his custom, fastened the door. next he kindled a good fire on the smouldering coals of the old one; and then, having stepped up to the room where will was a prisoner, he unlocked and opened the door and told him to come out. will did so with alacrity.
the demon said no more, but pointed out a seat, and quietly prepared to get supper. he took a fat bird out of his pouch, and roasted it carefully over the fire. then he fixed part of a chicken, a delicious fish, and sundry other eatables, each on a separate stick, where the fire would cook them. to will’s astonishment, he suddenly appeared with a few slices of bread, which he put on a toaster and toasted while the other things were being cooked. now, who ever read about a hermit that toasted bread?
by the way, the demon, like the writer in inditing these few chapters, had several “irons in the fire” at once.
when everything was ready, he set a table with the[184] food thus prepared, and took a pan of skim-milk from a crazy cupboard built in the wall.
“sit down and eat,” he said to will; “i’ll speak with you afterwards.”
will was in no humor to care about eating, and as it was yet early in the evening he was not hungry; but not liking to refuse the strange man’s hospitality, he sat down to the table and “ate like an emigrant,” as henry would have phrased it. he afterwards told his friends that the “victuals were very good.”
after supper the demon cleared off the table and put everything in the room in far better order than it was when the hero was taken into it.
up to this time scarcely a word had been spoken between them. will was filled with dread that he had killed, or at least severely hurt, his cousin. he, of course, did not know that henry was in full possession of his senses as he lay on the ground, nor that he was doing this only to disarm the demon. the wildest fears flashed through his brain; his sufferings were more intense than stephen’s had been on the island. he blamed himself; he blamed henry; he blamed the pistols; he blamed the demon. yet he felt himself utterly unable to escape. and he was troubled on his own account. what did the demon intend to do with him? why did he detain him there? these questions perplexed the boy; and not knowing what else to do, he tried hard to think it all a dream. but no; it could not be a dream, for in a dream there is never any smoke to make one sneeze. then henry’s wild tales about the demon’s cannibalism and cruelty recurred to him. certainly, the demon’s look was forbidding—almost ferocious; but will did not think him capable of torturing any one. he had too much good sense to think that the man would do him any harm; but still he feared him, and felt ill at ease in his presence.
he had had no particular desire to come on this wild-goose-chase, because he wished to keep out of mischief during his stay at his aunt’s. he was not so mercurial, whimsical, and romantic, as his cousin, and he had consented to go as much to please him as for any other reason.
[185]
“i think i shall have to get pa to shut me up, if i ever find my way back home,” he mused, in his despair. “no matter what i do, something always comes to grief. i thought surely it would be safe to fly a little balloon, when henry had always done it. but no; it must come down, and set a building on fire! how is it that everything goes wrong with me? am i a blockhead, or a fool? oh dear! i get into worse scrapes every time; but this is the worst yet—this beats them all! if henry and i survive this, i suppose we shall stumble into something that will finish us entirely! now, i knew it was wrong to start with loaded pistols, and i didn’t want to do it. then, why did i? i deserve all this misery for my foolishness. but poor henry! it seems to me now that he must be alive. oh! if i could only know!”
then he began to wonder how it was that the demon had come upon them so suddenly. “he was there all at once,” will said to himself, as he glanced furtively at the “recluse.” “did he come from the cave, or the valley, or the bank, or a hollow in the tree, or the clouds? all i know is, he wasn’t anywhere near, till suddenly he had me in his arms! and henry was as much surprised to see him as i was! well, the man must be a wizard—or else a witch, or a humbug! if i could only get away!”
it has been shown that henry reflected that no one would know where to look for them. the same appalling thought occurred to will. but, like an inspiration, it came to him that the teamster who had given them a ride eyed them narrowly as they went up the valley.
“now, if that teamster will only do us as good a turn as the sailor did when we paddled away in the punt,” he said to himself, “we may be saved yet!”
boy-like, the hero pinned his faith on the teamster, and felt considerably happier. in fact, five minutes more, and he had settled it in his own mind that, sooner or later, they would be saved through him.
some writers, with fiendish ingenuity, seem to set themselves deliberately to work to unstring the nerves of their weak-headed readers, so that they shall plunge headlong into unfortunate speculations, and be ruined.
[186]
but the writer of this history is actuated by no such motives. he, good soul, uses no guile with his readers, wishes to deprive no one of needful sleep, and would shrink with horror from tampering with any one’s business or intellect.
when the writer was a boy, he read a strong and exciting romance, written by a master-hand. there were no idle dissertations in it; every chapter, every paragraph, every sentence, every line, rang with meaning; and it was so forcibly written that it would captivate a stronger mind than his. he [your humble servant, “the writer,”] was not content with one perusal, but read it again, and then lent it to three other boys, who read it with equal avidity. when returned, he might have been tempted to read it for the third time; but, alas! those boys, in their eagerness to read, had apparently neglected to wash their hands; and had turned over the leaves so hurriedly that it was in a state of dilapidation.
the writer has nothing to say against that romance. he learned many things from it, and unhesitatingly pronounces it the best he ever read. it is still green in his memory—in fact, he looks back on it to-day with feelings of respect and admiration. but it distracted his thoughts from his lessons, and muddled his wits to such an extent that he fears sometimes they are muddled yet.
behold the result. a reaction set in, and all preposterous romances, that one excepted, have become to him an abomination.
hence outbursts like the one above.
