Part 83 (1/2)
”See? Yes Don't ask me”
”But where are they?”
”Sleep Drunk, I think After they'd tied us prisoners all up and shut up all the wo _whare_, what do you think they did?”
”Kill the'lar feast, and danced about--theot toomuch But, Mas' Don”
”Yes, Jem”
”Don't ask me to tell you no o to sleep?”
”I don't know, Jeet ourselves loose, and set to and get away, for I don't think anybody's watching us; but I couldn't go two steps, I know Could you run away by yourself?”
”I don't know,” said Don ”I' to try”
”Well, but that's stupid, Mas' Don, when you et help”
”Where, Jem?”
”Ah!” said the poor fellow, after a pause, ”I never thought about that”
They lay still under the blinking stars, with the wind blowing chill fro of bitter despondency which hung over Don's spirit seerow darker His head throbbed violently, and a dull nu pain was in his wrists and ankles Then, too, as he opened his lips, he felt a cruel, parching, feverish thirst, which seerees to pass away as he listened to the low , and then for a few minutes he lost consciousness
But it was only to start into wakefulness again, and stare wildly at the faintly-seen fence of the great _pah_, right over his head, and through which he could see the twinkling of a star
As he realised where he was once ain, but a heavy breathing was the only response, and he lay thinking of home and of his bedrooht of Bristol, a curious feeling of thankfulness canorance of the fate that had befallen her son
”What would she say--ould she think, if she knew that I was lying here on the ground, a prisoner, and wounded--here at the es--ould she say?”
A short ti that fate had done its worst for hirave
But he thought now that it ht have been far worse, for his mother was spared his horror
And then as he lay helpless there, and in pain, with his coe now and then ht seemed to come back, and he felt feverish and wild But after a time that passed off, and the pain and chill troubled him, but only to pass off as well, and be succeeded by a drowsy sensation
And then as he lay there, the words of the old, old prayers he had repeated at histheony and horrors of that terrible ti to hie Manville Fenn
CHAPTER FORTY ONE
PRISONERS OF WAR