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This rather astonished us, and we asked if any relics were still in the camp, upon which one of the gins produced an old sheath-knife, worn down nearly to nothing by constant sharpening; half a dozen horn buttons, one of them still sewn to a fragment of moleskin; and an empty tin match-box.
Soon cometh my companion, her slender middle girt by a goatskin girdle whereto she had hung our other sheath-knife and my wallet; so we set out together side by side. Reaching the little valley, we turned off to the right, or westerly, according to Adam's map, following the stream that rippled amid great boulders or flowed 'twixt banks adorned with many-hued flowers most rare to be seen.
The very minute he sank exhausted into the snow they would be upon him the great white leader and her rapacious horde and in his imagination he could feel the viselike clench of iron jaws and the tearing rip with which the quivering flesh would be stripped from his bones. At midday the man placed the sheath-knife in his belt and threw away the pack.
But his cat-like suppleness enabled him eventually to wriggle his sheath-knife out of his breast pocket, and he found no great difficulty then in freeing himself from his bonds. He stood now with his knife in his hand and listened. Before long he heard the American's voice, with the police, and they appeared to be searching. He shouted to them; and the next moment he was released.
Now he provided himself with a repeating-rifle in a water-proof case, a revolver, fifty rounds of ammunition for each, an India-rubber poncho, a small quantity of quinine, a phial of powerful cholera mixture, a stout sheath-knife, and a tin cup.
So he took a bed of skins with him down to the boathouse, and slept there at night; but in the daytime he perched himself on a pole on the roof, and bellowed out that now he was sailing. Sometimes he rode astraddle on the roof ridge, and dug his sheath-knife deep into the rafters, so that people might think he fancied himself at sea, holding fast on to the keel of a boat.
He was laying about him lustily with his sheath-knife, lopping the canes right and left, like a reaper, and soon made quite a clearing around us. This sight reanimated me; and seizing my own knife, I hacked and hewed away without mercy. But, alas! the farther we advanced the thicker and taller, and apparently the more interminable, the reeds became.
He slid a hand up the clerk's belt to the sheath-knife; and they drew very close to each other in that last clinch. Percy Cuthfert felt his strength leave him. The lower portion of his body was useless, The inert weight of Weatherbee crushed him crushed him and pinned him there like a bear under a trap. The cabin became filled with a familiar odor, and he knew the bread to be burning.
His sheath-knife was an antique a sort of old-fashioned pruning-hook; its handle a sperm whale's tooth was carved all over with ships, cannon, and anchors. It was attached to his neck by a lanyard, elaborately worked into "rose-knots" and "Turks' heads" by his own venerable fingers.
With his long, broad-bladed sheath-knife Jock was not long in piling under the sheltered underside of a great rock over which the heather grew, such a heap of heather twigs as Ralph could hardly believe had been cut in so short a time. These he compacted into an excellent mattress, springy and level, with pliable interlacings of broom.
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