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Updated: June 23, 2025
The cry the thrilling, never-to-be-forgotten, heart-wringing cry of the first-born! "Oh, God!" breathed Allan, while down his cheeks hot tears gushed unrestrained. The door opened. Gesafam beckoned. Trembling, weak as a child, the man faltered in. Still burned the lamp upon the table.
"Look, master, look! The bridge! The bridge!" He turned quickly as old Gesafam pointed up-stream. There, clearly outlined against the sky, he saw a dozen a score of little, crouching figures emerge from the forest on the north bank, and at a clumsy run defile along the swaying footpath high above the rapids.
How long a respite might be counted on before the inevitable, decisive battle? A score, a hundred questions, more and more illusory, blent and faded and reformed in his overtaxed mind. Then, blessed as a balm, sleep took him. A violent shaking roused him from dead slumber. Old Gesafam stood there beside him. She had him by the arm. "Waken, O master!" she was crying. "O Kromno, rouse!
A weaker man would have succumbed long ago to but half the hardships he had struggled through. Now he must rest a bit. "Bring water, Gesafam!" he commanded. When she had obeyed, he let her wash his wounds and dress them with leaves and ointment. Then he himself bandaged them, his head nodding, eyes already drooping shut from moment to moment.
She kissed him, then with a smile of happiness in all her pain said: "Go, dearest! You must go now!" And, as he lingered, old Gesafam, chattering shrilly, seized him by the arm and pushed him toward the doorway. Dazed and in silence he submitted. But when the door had closed behind him, and he stood alone there in the moonlight above the rushing river, a sudden exaltation thrilled him.
If I'm left all alone in the wilderness with Gesafam and the boy what then?" The thought was too horrible for contemplation. So many blows had crashed home to her soul the past week even the past few hours that the girl felt numbed and dazed as in a nightmare.
And there, working with the help of three or four women, hampered in every way for lack of proper materials, she labored hour after hour dressing wounds, setting broken bones, watching no few die, even despite the best that she could do. Old Gesafam came to seek her there with news that the child cried of hunger.
A cradle rocked by Gesafam a little older and more bent, yet still hardy gave glimpses of another olive-branch, this one a girl. The piazza was littered at its farthest end with serviceable, home-made playthings; but Allan, Junior, had no use for them to-day. Out there on the lawn of the plaza he was rolling and running with a troop of other children many, many children, indeed.
He must have slept an hour or two; it had seemed but a second. In the west the sun was burning its way toward the horizon, through a thick set of haze that cloaked the rim of the earth. "Here, master! See!" Stooping, she picked up a long, slight object and handed it to him. "One of their poisoned darts, so help me!" he exclaimed. "Cast that into the fire, Gesafam.
"It is past and done, Gesafam. That enemy, at least, will never come again! But tell me, what causes the boy to cry?" "He is hungered, master. And I I do not know the way to milk the strange animal!" Despite his exhaustion, pain and dour forebodings, Allan had to smile a second. "That's one thing you've got to learn, old mother!" he exclaimed. "I'll milk presently. But not just yet!"
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