The Sound of His Horn by Sarban Page B

sobbing and muttering in so low and broken a voice that I could not tell whether he was uttering words or only those distorted sounds which were all that the Count's slaves could produce. Then, as I got my hands under his shoulders and lifted him up, he became calmer and I distinguished that he was speaking French.
    He allowed me to pass my hands over his head and body, though he trembled and groaned a little in fear. His hair and beard were long, and he was wearing the same kind of skin-like garments as I was myself. He was a small man, and, I guessed, a good deal older than I. Doing my best to reassure him in my bad French, I drew him over to sit down beside me on a pile of dry straw which I felt at the back of the hut.
    At length he was confident enough to begin timidly feeling my features and clothes in turn, and to ask me who I was. I answered him very briefly that I was an Englishman who had escaped from a prison camp, that in running away I had blundered into the fence of rays round Hackelnberg forest, and after being treated by the Doctor had now been turned loose in the forest by the orders of the Count von Hackelnberg. He shuddered at the name and groaned very deeply.
    "They will kill you," he said, half weeping. "They will kill you. They will kill us all. They drive me from place to place. They drive me and there is no rest. I cannot sleep. I am going mad!" And he repeated the word 'mad' a dozen times, his voice rising to a shriek of terror and despair that appalled me.
    I soon became convinced that he was in fact very near to madness, crazed by some abominable terror that I could not get him to describe explicitly. I thought to calm him more by asking him his history, but he could not keep his mind for more than a moment on anything but the horror that haunted and hunted him in the woods. He started like a wild animal at the slightest sound among the trees outside the hut; hushed me with a hissing intake of breath, and held himself rigidly clenched together to listen to faint, unidentifiable noises far away.
    All I could gather was that he was an educated man--a writer, it would seem, for he babbled disjointedly, crying like a child explaining a misdemeanour for which it has been beaten, about some letters or articles he had written, jumbling together a collection of ill-pronounced German names and wailing: "I only followed
them.
I didn't know it was wrong. Why did they punish me? Why didn't they let me recant? They know I would never have written it if I'd known it was wrong. They misled me on purpose to have me tortured, on purpose to kill me to make them laugh. Oh, God! They're going to kill me for sport!"
    I think half the night must have passed with my sitting there on the straw with that poor maniac, now trying to comfort him, now trying to elicit from him some clearer account of what it was he so feared--though God knows, I had seen my share of the horrors of Hackelnberg and could guess at others enough to send a man out of his mind. I could feel that the man, besides being under such mental strain, was mortally fatigued; but when I asked him what he did in the woods in the daytime, and where he found his food and whether this hut was his resting-place, he either did not answer, or muttered low with a kind of selfish, crazy cunning, that he would not tell me lest I betray him.
    I was hungry enough, but there was nothing to eat in the hut; I was tired too, and feeling at last that I could help the man no more, nor he me, and believing that I had nothing to fear from him, I stretched myself on the straw and slept.
    The sun woke me, and I found myself alone. Outside the forest was a wonder of fresh green and gold, cool, gay and delightful. I looked down the fair green glade, listened to the bird-song, stretched myself and breathed deep. My freedom might be only comparative, but it felt like real freedom; and in that broad early sunlight, with the sweet trees of the forest so real, so true to their own nature,