"I don't need it none, sir," said Sullivan, edging away. "There'd ought to be fine buggin' back along. An' hell-apples, I reckon."
"Take it," said Burrell shortly, and Sullivan yielded to the habit of obedience. He turned for his journey.
"Hold on," his officer commanded. "You're forgettin' something." He lifted a clawlike hand, and Sullivan gripped it for a minute in silence. He strode across the little opening to the beginning of the back trail. There he halted, turned, and hurled the tin of bacon at his commander. "You go to hell, sir," he shrilled defiantly. "I'll do fine, buggin',"--and he ran stumblingly down the trail.
The Captain twisted his head--it was the only movement he could make--and watched the retreating figure of the mutineer. "H'm," he muttered after it, and shut his eyes, to wait.
For the first few hours Sullivan, uplifted by the thought of his mission, went on at what seemed to him a tremendous pace. In reality his knees lifted jerkily, his feet came down flat and stiff, and his stride was that of a child. A giddiness, too, overtook him now and then, and a white mist drifted before his eyes. At such times the walls of the trail seemed to rush by in a blur of green, and he had an exhilarating sense of rapid movement.
Long before noon he had covered the three miles and a half to the first camp on the back trail. There he hesitated. A temptingly crumbly log lay beside the trail, and his stomach was cramped with such hunger as he had not felt for days. But he halted only a moment. "Time enough to eat to-night," he muttered, and went on.
The afternoon was harder. The giddiness and the mist assailed him oftener, and several times, when the blankness became complete, he was roused by finding that his face had come into not ungentle contact with the ground. Once, doubling limply, he struck his face on his knee instead, and a cut lip gave him the pleasant salty taste of blood. Sharp pains of breathlessness stabbed his sides at intervals, and his heart had fits of throbbing suffocatingly. But he never halted as long as he could see. When the trail was only blackness in the night he sank down.
The rain and the light woke him to an accusing sense that it had long been day. He moved on at once. "I'll eat when I've made that up," he muttered, as the blur enclosed him.