It would be long weeks before Ben could hope for sufficient strength to start the journey down to the settlements, even if the way were open.  As it was their only chance lay in the fall rains that would flood the Yuga and enable them to journey down to the native villages in their canoe.  These rains would not fall till October.  For all that she had hoarded their supplies to the last morsel, eating barely enough herself to sustain life in her body, the dread spectre of starvation waited just without the cave.  She had realized perfectly that Ben could not hope to throw off the malady without nutritious food and she had not stinted with him; and now, just when she had begun to hope for his recovery, she shook the last precious cup of flour from the sack.

The rice and sugar were gone, long since.  The honey she had hoarded to give Ben—­knowing its warming, nutritive value—­not tasting a drop herself.  Of all their stores only a few pieces of jerked caribou remained; she had used the rest to make rich broth for Ben, and there was no way under heaven whereby they might procure more.

The rifle was broken.  The last of the pistol shots was fired the day she had prepared the poisoned cup for Ben.

Yet she still waged the fight, struggling with high courage and tireless resolution against the frightful odds that opposed her.  Her faith was as of that nameless daughter of the Gileadite; and she could not yield.  Not ambition, not hatred—­not even such fire of fury as had been wakened in Wolf Darby’s heart that first frenzied night on the hillside—­could have been the impulse for such fortitude and sacrifice as hers.  It was not one of these base passions—­known in the full category to her rescuers who were even now bearing down upon her valley—­that kept the steel in her thews and the steadfastness in her heart.  She loved this man; her love for him was as wholesome and as steadfast as her own self; and the law of that love was to give him all she had.

There were few witnesses to this infinite giving of hers.  Ben himself still lingered in a strange stupor, remembering nothing, knowing neither the girl nor himself.  Perhaps the wild things saw her desperate efforts to find food in the wilderness,—­the long hours of weary searching for a handful of berries that gave such little nourishment to his weakened body, or for a few acorns stored for winter by bird or rodent.  Sometimes a great-antlered moose—­an easy trophy if the rifle had been unbroken—­saw her searching for wocus like a lost thing in the tenacious mud of the marshes; and almost nightly a silent wolf, pausing in his hunting, gazed uneasily through the cavern maw.  But mostly her long hours of service in the cave, the chill nights that she sat beside Ben’s cot, the dreary mornings when she cooked her own scanty breakfast and took her uneasy rest, the endless labor of fire-mending so that the cave could be kept at an even heat went unobserved by mortal eyes.  The healing forces of his body called for warmth and nourishment; but for all the might of her efforts she waged a losing fight.