might be recovering from some injury; in either case she had only one
desire, and that was to procure for him the necessary comforts. Having
no access to hay or straw, she began rapidly to gather the bracken which
was standing two and three feet high in great quantities wherever the
ground was dry under the trees. She worked with a nervous strength that
was extraordinary, even to herself, after the toilsome night. When she
had filled the sack, she put it upon the floor of the lower room and
went back to the canoe. She saw that Bart had roused himself and was
sitting up. He was even holding on to the rushes with his hand--an act
which she thought showed the dreamy state of his mind, for she did not
notice that the rope had come undone. She helped Bart out of the canoe,
putting her arm strongly round him so that he was able to walk. She saw
that he had not his mind yet; he said no word about the help she gave
him; he walked as a sleeping man might walk. When she laid him down upon
the bed of bracken and arranged his head upon the thicker part which she
had heaped for a pillow, he seemed to her to fall asleep almost at once;
and yet, for fear that his strange condition was not sleep, she hastily
opened the bag of food and the flask of rum.

She stripped the twigs from a tiny spruce tree, piling them inside the
old stove. When they had cracked and blazed with a fierce, sudden heat,
Ann could only break bread-crumbs into a cupful of boiling water and put
a few drops of rum in it. She woke Bart and fed him as she might have
fed a baby. When he lay down again exhausted, with that strange moan
which he always gave when he first put back his head, she had the
comfort of believing that a better colour came to his cheek than before.
She resolved that if he rested quietly for a few hours and appeared
better after the next food she gave him, she would think it safe to
cushion the canoe with bracken and take him home. This thought suggested
to her to moor the canoe.