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Kneeling beside me, Emerson reached up and took Abdullah’s knife. “Start a fire,” he said. Abdullah stared blankly at him for a moment, and then nodded.

There was fuel at hand, part of Kevin’s supplies. I was vaguely aware of Abdullah’s rapid movements, but most of my attention, I confess, was focused on my boot, at which Emerson was slashing. The laces were knotted and sticky with saliva, and the part of the boot around the ankle had been torn to shreds.

“Don’t touch it!” I exclaimed. “Your hands are always scratched and cut; an open wound—”

I broke off with a cry of pain I could not repress, as Emerson seized the boot in a savage grip and wrenched it off. Cyrus came round the corner of the house in time to hear my exclamation. Fury darkened his brow and he was, I think, about to hurl himself on Emerson when he saw the body of the dog. The color drained from his face as, with his usual quick intelligence, he grasped the significance of the scene.

“God in heaven!” he cried. “Did it—”

“That is what I am trying to ascertain, you damned fool,” said Emerson, inspecting my dirty stocking with the intense concentration of a scientist peering through a microscope. “Keep them back,” he added, as the others hurried up, exclaiming in question and in alarm. “And don’t touch the—”

The sound that issued from his lips was not a gasp or a groan. It was a muttered expletive. I had seen it too—such a small rent, barely an inch long. But it was large enough to mean my death.

Carefully Emerson stripped the stocking off and took my bare foot in his hand.

It is not proper to be vain about one’s personal appearance, and heaven knows I had little cause; but in the privacy of these pages I will confess I had always believed I had rather pretty feet. Small and narrow, with high arches, they had been described in appreciative terms by no less an authority than Emerson himself. Now he stared fixedly, not at the appendage but at the tiny scratch on my ankle. The skin had barely been broken. There were only a few drops of blood.

For a moment no one spoke. Then Abdullah said, “The fire burns well, Father of Curses.” He held out his hand. I thought it trembled a little.

Emerson gave him the knife.

If Ramses had been there, he would already have been talking. Kevin was almost as perniciously loquacious as my son, so I was not surprised when he was the first to break the silence. His freckles stood out dark against the pallor of his face. “It is only the merest scratch. Perhaps the dog was not mad. Perhaps—”

“If someone does not silence that babbling idiot of an Irishman I will knock him down,” said Emerson.

“We cannot afford to take the chance, Kevin,” I said. “I am going to sit up now—”

“You are not going to sit up now,” said Emerson, in the same remote voice. “Vandergelt, make yourself useful. Put your knapsack under her head and see if you can locate a bottle of brandy.”

“I always carry a flask of brandy,” I said, fumbling at my belt. “For medicinal purposes, of course. There is water in this other flask.”

Emerson took the brandy from me and wrenched off the top. I swigged it down like a hardened drunkard, for unnecessary martyrdom is not something I court. I only wished I could drink enough of the horrid stuff to render myself intoxicated and unconscious, but I knew if I consumed it too quickly I would only be sick.

Better sick, drunk, or in pain than dead. Hydrophobia is inevitably fatal, and it would be difficult to think of a more unpleasant way in which to die.

When Abdullah returned, my head was already spinning and I was glad to lie back against the support Cyrus had prepared. He knelt beside me, his face a mask of sympathetic anguish, and took my hand in his. The blade of the knife glowed cherry-red with heat. Abdullah had wrapped a cloth around the handle. Emerson took it from him.

It is quite an uncomfortable sensation, of course. Oddly enough the thing I minded most was the hiss and the stench of burning