“I’ve fooled you this time,” he said. “Marion is safe. Safe with people you can’t scare or trick. Safe from me—and safe from you. Leave her alone—or you’ll get caught in a trap—and die of it—like me.”
Later, he said, “You can’t touch her, Balenger. Even the red dogs would kill you. They’re my friends.”
His right hand and arm were in a terrible state. The hand had been crushed straight across and torn by the steel teeth of the trap which Ian McAllister, in unthinking cruelty, had set in the O’Dell pantry. Hand and wrist were dark and swollen. The arm was swollen to the shoulder. Jim bathed it with warm water, then with hot water. They applied wads of hot, wet moss to the arm; but they had no bandages and nothing of which to make bandages for the wounded hand. And in their haste they had come without medicines—without quinine or iodine.
Sherwood was still alive at dawn. He even seemed to be a little stronger and in less suffering. His arm was no worse, that was certain. They gave him a little more stimulant and a few spoonfuls of condensed milk diluted in warm water. It was evident from his appearance that he had been without nourishment of any sort for days and yet he seemed unconscious of hunger. He was far too ill and weak to feel anything but the pain of his hand and arm.
Jim set out for home after breakfast, on a straight line, to fetch in bandages and quinine and to get his sister’s advice as to the wisdom of using iodine. He believed that nourishment and simple remedies would revive Sherwood so that they could safely remove him to the house in the course of a day or two. Then he would get a doctor from Woodstock, Doctor Scott whom he knew, to deal with the injured hand. He believed that the inflammation of the hand and arm could be reduced in the meantime by simple treatment. He left both dogs and the gun with Noel Sabattis and the sick man.
The searchers must have covered close upon thirty miles of ground in their hunt for Sherwood but they had not gone more than eight miles straight to the northward. McAllister traveled a bee line, pausing now and then to look up at the sun from an open glade. He reached the house within two hours and twenty minutes of leaving the camp in the secluded hollow.
