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When at last night closed down upon them the girl was, at heart, terror stricken,
but she hid her true state from the man, because she knew that their plight was
no fault of his. The strange and uncanny noises of the jungle night filled her with
the most dreadful forebodings, and when a cold, drizzling rain set in upon them
her cup of misery was full.
Bulan rigged a rude shelter for her, making her lie down beneath it, and then he
removed his Dyak war-coat and threw it over her, but it was hours before her
exhausted body overpowered her nervous fright and won a fitful and restless
slumber. Several times Virginia became obsessed with the idea that Bulan had
left her alone there in the jungle, but when she called his name he answered from
close beside her shelter.
She thought that he had reared another for himself nearby, but even the thought
that he might sleep filled her with dread, yet she would not call to him again,
since she knew that he needed his rest even more than she. And all the night
Bulan stood close beside the woman he had learned to love--stood almost naked
in the chill night air and the cold rain, lest some savage man or beast creep out of
the darkness after her while he slept.
The next day with its night, and the next, and the next were but repetitions of the
first. It had become an agony of suffering for the man to fight off sleep longer.
The girl read part of the truth in his heavy eyes and worn face, and tried to force
him to take needed rest, but she did not guess that he had not slept for four days
and nights.
At last abused Nature succumbed to the terrific strain that had been put upon
her, and the giant constitution of the man went down before the cold and the wet,
weakened and impoverished by loss of sleep and insufficient food; for through the
last two days he had been able to find but little, and that little he had given to the
girl, telling her that he had eaten his fill while he gathered hers.
It was on the fifth morning, when Virginia awoke, that she found Bulan rolling
and tossing upon the wet ground before her shelter, delirious with fever. At the
sight of the mighty figure reduced to pitiable inefficiency and weakness, despite
the knowledge that her protector could no longer protect, the fear of the jungle
faded from the heart of the young girl--she was no more a weak and trembling
daughter of an effete civilization. Instead she was a lioness, watching over and
protecting her sick mate. The analogy did not occur to her, but something else
did as she saw the flushed face and fever wracked body of the man whose appeal
to her she would have thought purely physical had she given the subject any
analytic consideration; and as a realization of his utter helplessness came to her
she bent over him and kissed first his forehead and then his lips.
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