"Your father . . . he is helping her?"

"Helping her?" I echoed. "My dear lad, if ever a young woman could
take care of herself it is the Princess. . . . And as for my father
helping her, she has packed him off northwards across the mountains
with a flea in his ear. And, talking of fleas--" I went on with a
glance at the hut.

He brought me to a full stop with a sudden grip on my arm,
astonishingly strong for a wounded man.

"Nay, lad--nay!" I coaxed him, but slipped a hand under him as he
insisted and sat upright.

"She needs help, I tell you," he gasped. "Needs help . . . it was
for help I ran when--when--"

"But what dreaming is this? My dear fellow, she makes prisoners of
us, shoots you down when you try to escape, treats me worse than a
dog, banishes us to this hut which--not to put too fine a point on
it--is a pigs'-sty, and particularly filthy at that. I don't blame
her, though some little explanation might not come amiss: but if she
has any need of help, you must admit that she dissembles it pretty
thoroughly."

Nat would not listen. "You did not see? You did not see?--And yet
you know her language and have talked with her! Whereas I--O blind!"
he broke out passionately, "blind that you could not see!"

A fit of coughing seized and shook him, and as I eased him back upon
his fern pillow, blood came away upon the handkerchief I held to his
lips.

"Damn her!" I swore viciously. "Let her need help if she will, and
let her ask me for it! She has tried her best to kill you; and
what's more, she'll succeed if you don't lie still as I order.
Help? Oh yes, I'll help her--when I have helped _you!_"

He moved his head feebly, as if to shake it: but lay quiet, panting,
with closed eyes: and so, the effusion of blood having ceased, I left
him and fell to work like a negro slave.

By the angle of the hut there stood a pigs' trough of granite,
roughly hewn and hollowed, and among the tools within I found a leaky
wooden bucket which, by daubing it with mud from the brink of the
stream, I contrived to make passably watertight. A score of times I
must have travelled to and fro between the hut and the stream before
I had the cistern filled. Then I fell-to upon the foul walls within,
slushing and brooming them. Bats dropped from the roof and flew
blundering against me: I drove them forth from the window. The mud
floor became a quag: I seized a spade and shovelled it clean, mud and
slime and worse filt