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I drew a long gray hair from my temple, and subjected it to a gentle friction between my palm and finger; then I pricked my wrist, and leaning forward, placed it against my heart: five blood-drops symbols of the five types of organized creation fell simmering into the depths, and the scintillant hair, floating after them, described a true spiral.
"Impossible. It would have the contrary effect." "You misjudge, Monsieur. Unrequited love is far less hard to bear when it meets with sympathy. It is only haughty contempt and heartless triumph that wring blood-drops from the heart. Sympathy is balm to the wounds of love. Believe me it is so. I feel it to be so. Oh! I feel it to be so!"
The cactus did its work; the alkali sands scalded his bleeding feet; he took off his shirt, tore it into strips and bound them round his ankles for footgear; and when the strips were cut through he used his undershirt, until finally he walked barefooted and the blood-drops showed beside his tracks. Toward the end the same blindness which comes to thirst-maddened cattle seized upon him.
The wounded trooper had recovered somewhat, and was on his hands and knees, with down-hanging head, in the light of the open door. 'How are you, Casey? asked the detective anxiously. 'Aisy, sor. I'm jist wonderin' if I'm dead or alive, said the trooper in a still small voice, watching the blood-drops falling from his forehead. 'Then the devil a bit's the matter with you, Casey.
They were the foot-tracks of a ruined monument of dark and painful history. More than this might be said of them. They were the blood-drops of a monstrosity chased from its den and hunted down by the people, who shuddered with horror at its sanguinary record of violence and wrong.
Fern-seed, in fact, would seem to be an emanation of the sun's fire at the two turning-points of its course, the summer and winter solstices. This view is confirmed by a German story in which a hunter is said to have procured fern-seed by shooting at the sun on Midsummer Day at noon; three drops of blood fell down, which he caught in a white cloth, and these blood-drops were the fern-seed.
But no living thing confronted her the tall, bent figure of the Cimbri Prophetess gleamed ghostly white upon the wall, and the bright blue augurous eyes seemed to count the dripping blood-drops; and the unbroken, solemn silence of night brooded over all things, hushing even the chime of sheep-bells, that had died away among the elm arches.
And my Lady Hopwood, and the fine Madams her daughters, all laced and furbelowed, and with widows' and orphans' tears, and the blood-drops of crimped seamen and kidnapped children, twinkling in their Stomachers for gems, were all set at their Bowery window, a pudding-fed Chaplain standing bowing and smirking behind them, and glozing in their ears no doubt Praises of their exceeding Charity and Humanity to wretches such as we were.
But Monsieur looked back again at the dead lad, and then at his son and at me, and came with us heavy of countenance. On the stones before us lay a trail of blood-drops. "Now, that is where Huguet ran with his wounded arm," I said to M. Étienne. "Aye, and if we did not know the way home we could find it by this red track."
To that excited imagination, which had always seen spirits in the sky and blood-drops on the corn and hieroglyphic marks on the dry leaves, how full the lonely forest must have been of signs and solemn warnings! Alone with the fox's bark, the rabbit's rustle, and the screech-owl's scream, the self-appointed prophet brooded over his despair.
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