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Page 7
Four years! It was not so very long, though the years had seemed like a
lifetime to him. There would not be many changes. Everything would be
the same--everything--except--the old home. That home he and his father
had planned, and they had overseen the building of it, a chateau of
logs a little distance from the town, with the Saskatchewan sweeping
below it and the forest at its doors. Masterless, it must have seen
changes in those four years. Fumbling in his pocket, his fingers
touched Conniston's watch. He drew it out and let the firelight play on
the open dial. It was ten o'clock. In the back of the premier half of
the case Conniston had at some time or another pasted a picture. It
must have been a long time ago, for the face was faded and indistinct.
The eyes alone were undimmed, and in the flash of the fire they took on
a living glow as they looked at Keith. It was the face of a young
girl--a schoolgirl, Keith thought, of ten or twelve. Yet the eyes
seemed older; they seemed pleading with someone, speaking a message
that had come spontaneously out of the soul of the child. Keith closed
the watch. Its tick, tick, tick rose louder to his ears. He dropped it
in his pocket. He could still hear it.
A pitch-filled spruce knot exploded with the startling vividness of a
star bomb, and with it came a dull sort of mental shock to Keith. He
was sure that for an instant he had seen Conniston's face and that the
Englishman's eyes were looking at him as the eyes had looked at him out
of the face in the watch. The deception was so real that it sent him
back a step, staring, and then, his eyes striving to catch the illusion
again, there fell upon him a realization of the tremendous strain he
had been under for many hours. It had been days since he had slept
soundly. Yet he was not sleepy now; he scarcely felt fatigue. The
instinct of self-preservation made him arrange his sleeping-bag on a
carpet of spruce boughs in the tent and go to bed.
Even then, for a long time, he lay in the grip of a harrowing
wakefulness. He closed his eyes, but it was impossible for him to hold
them closed. The sounds of the night came to him with painful
distinctness--the crackling of the fire, the serpent-like hiss of the
flaming pitch, the whispering of the tree tops, and the steady tick,
tick, tick of Conniston's watch. And out on the barren, through the rim
of sheltering trees, the wind was beginning to moan its everlasting
whimper and sob of loneliness. In spite of his clenched hands and his
fighting determination to hold it off, Keith fancied that he heard
again--riding strangely in that wind--the sound of Conniston's voice.
And suddenly he asked himself: What did it mean? What was it that
Conniston had forgotten? What was it that Conniston had been trying to
tell him all that day, when he had felt the presence of him in the
gloom of the Barrens? Was it that Conniston wanted him to come back?
He tried to rid himself of the depressing insistence of that thought.
And yet he was certain that in the last half-hour before death entered
the cabin the Englishman had wanted to tell him something and had
crucified the desire. There was the triumph of an iron courage in those
last words, "Remember, old chap, you win or lose the moment McDowell
first sets his eyes on you!"--but in the next instant, as death sent
home its thrust, Keith had caught a glimpse of Conniston's naked soul,
and in that final moment when speech was gone forever, he knew that
Conniston was fighting to make his lips utter words which he had left
unspoken until too late. And Keith, listening to the moaning of the
wind and the crackling of the fire, found himself repeating over and
over again, "What was it he wanted to say?"
In a lull in the wind Conniston's watch seemed to beat like a heart in
its case, and swiftly its tick, tick, ticked to his ears an answer,
"Come back, come back, come back!"
With a cry at his own pitiable weakness, Keith thrust the thing far
under his sleeping-bag, and there its sound was smothered. At last
sleep overcame him like a restless anesthesia.
With the break of another day he came out of his tent and stirred the
fire. There were still bits of burning ember, and these he fanned into
life and added to their flame fresh fuel. He could not easily forget
last night's torture, but its significance was gone. He laughed at his
own folly and wondered what Conniston himself would have thought of his
nervousness. For the first time in years he thought of the old days
down at college where, among other things, he had made a mark for
himself in psychology. He had considered himself an expert in the
discussion and understanding of phenomena of the mind. Afterward he had
lived up to the mark and had profited by his beliefs, and the fact that
a simple relaxation of his mental machinery had so disturbed him last
night amused him now. The solution was easy. It was his mind struggling
to equilibrium after four years of brain-fag. And he felt better. His
brain was clearer. He listened to the watch and found its ticking
natural. He braced himself to another effort and whistled as he
prepared his breakfast.
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