Ned was unconscious, his face was hot with fever, and his
breathing was hard and irregular.
"How he escaped from the Alamo and how he came here we don't know," said
Obed White solemnly, "but there are lots of strange things in heaven and
earth, as old Shakespeare said, and this is one of the strangest of them
all."
"However, it's happened we're glad to get him back," said the Panther.
"And now we must go to work. You can tell by lookin' at him that he's
been through all kinds of trouble, an' a powerful lot of it."
These skilled borderers knew that Ned was suffering from exhaustion.
They forced open his mouth, poured a drink down his throat from a flask
that Karnes carried, and rubbed his hands vigorously. Ned, after a
while, opened his eyes and looked at them dimly. He knew in a vague way
that these were familiar faces, but he remembered nothing, and he felt
no surprise.
"Ned! Ned! Don't; you know us?" said Will Allen. "We're your friends,
and we found you lying here in the bush!"
The clouds slowly cleared away from Ned's mind and it all came back, the
terrible and treacherous slaughter of his unarmed comrades, his own
flight through the timber his swimming of the river, and then the blank.
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