His ankle was swollen, sore and painful; he
could not touch the foot to the floor, and he howled when we tried to
move it.
Evidently he had suffered a good deal, and pity prevented us from
freeing our minds to him as fully as we should otherwise have done. The
main thing now was to get him home, where a doctor could attend him.
"We shall have to haul him on the hand sled," Addison said to me; and
fortunately the sled that Alfred and he had taken was there at the camp.
But first we cooked a meal of some of the beef, corn meal and coffee
they had taken from the old Squire's.
It was still raining; and on going out an hour later we found that the
stream had risen so high that we could not cross it. The afternoon, too,
was waning; and, urgent as Halstead's case appeared, we had to give up
the idea of starting that night. During the rest of the afternoon we
busied ourselves rigging a rude seat on the sled.
There were good dry bunks at the camp, but little sleep was in store for
us. Halstead was in a fevered, querulous mood and kept calling to us for
something or other all night long. Whenever he fell asleep he tumbled
about and hurt his ankle.
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