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He could hardly bring himself to believe it when he found at last that he was no longer pursued, that he had no longer to force one leg in front of the other, that he could fling himself on to the ground and gaspingly regain his breath and wait for the sledge-hammer beating of his heart to subside. When the time came that he could move once more, he crept along to peer through the thorn bushes over the crest of the hill to where his late pursuers were gathered round the foot of a tall, isolated tree. They were hoisting the ba
There was sorrow in Dodd's heart as he looked down on the pitiful scene, but it did not prevent him from turning away and setting himself to survey and plan the next adventurous quarter of a mile of his route. There are many who give up, and many who procrastinate, but there are some who go on.
After this the nightmare-like quality of Dodd's Odyssey persisted. There was loneliness to be contended with now; it bore heavily on Dodd in the end. Often he found himself, as he crawled and crept on his way, muttering directions to himself- usually in the baby Portuguese which was all he had spoken during the last months. Loneliness and fatigue and strain and bad food made a strange dark labyrinth of his mind, but they did not prevent him from creeping steadily along on his self-set task. He ate very little of his roast mule meat, for he never seemed hungry, but he still went on.
It must have been the very day when Bernardino was hanged that the ca
It was in the afternoon that Dodd reached the Zezere, and it was evening when he set eyes again on the bridging equipment. In a straight line it is twenty-five miles from where Dodd started to Punhete; Dodd's route with all its zigzags and detours must have stretched to fifty- the greater part of which he had done on his hands and knees or on his belly.
Chapter XIX
DODD reached the river unexpectedly and halted in some dismay above its ravine. He had passed several streams already, and had been able to splash through them, but this was a raging river, ru
He slid down the nearly vertical fifty-foot bank of the ravine and began to pick his way along the water's edge with the river roaring beside him. It was difficult walking, for the river filled its bed, and the side of the ravine ran nearly vertically down to the water. And at frequent intervals Dodd had to climb this bank to peer over the edge, to look both for the enemy and to see if the high road were yet in sight.
As he made his way downstream the sides of the ravine became not merely lower but less sloped. Dodd began to fear that soon he would be deprived of the cover of this deep, natural trench. Indeed, he actually formed the resolution to leave it because the ravine had grown so shallow that it was no shelter at all, but, on the contrary, an added danger. Accessible ru
But just as he reached this decision he saw the bridging train. There was no mistaking it, assembled down there on the river bank with just a glint of the Tagus showing in the distance. There were the pontoons, stacked in orderly piles just above the water, and the great masses of timber road- way, and heaps of cables, and Dodd could see men busily at work putting up a low roof over the mass of material, and others above the water hammering away at what Dodd guessed to be runways for lowering the pontoons down to the river.
It was nearly dark by now, and Dodd had but a short time to observe these things. As twilight fell he picked his way upstream again and chose a lair for himself-a stony hollow in the side of the ravine, where he could rest. That night, just as on most of the other nights and most of the days, it rained heavily and a cold wind blew. Dodd still, before going to sleep, found passing through his mind that old Biblical passage about foxes having holes and birds having nests.
Yet if he had been asked-it is quite impossible, but assume it to have happened- if he were happy, he would not have known what to reply. He would have admitted readily enough that he was uncomfortable, that he was cold, and badly fed, and verminous; that his clothes were in rags; and his feet and knees and elbows raw and bleeding through much walking and crawling; that he was in ever-present peril of his life, and that he really did not expect to survive the adventure he was about to thrust himself into voluntarily, but all this had nothing to do with happiness: that was something he never stopped to think about. Perhaps the fact that he did not think about it proves he was happy. He was a soldier carrying out his duty as well as he knew how. He would have been the first to admit that under the wise direction of an officer what he had done and what he proposed to do might be more successful, but as it was he felt (or rather he would have felt if he had thought about it) he had nothing with which to reproach himself. And that condition is not at all far from true happiness. At the same time he would have been utterly astonished if he had ever been told that some day a real printed book would devote paragraphs to the consideration of his frame of mind.
The usual shuddering misty morning succeeded the watery dawn, and Dodd stretched to loosen his stiffened joints and peered about for an enemy before making his way down the rushing river again to the point from which he could see the bridge-building preparations. He was terribly aware that he must enter into this adventure as well prepared as possible. He was all alone; if he should fail there was no one now who might repeat the attempt after him. From what he could see time was not of pressing importance. He proposed to devote the whole of to-day- longer, if necessary- to observing what was before him.