intending to rest for a spell. But the minutes added themselves
one on top of another. The sun slipped behind clouds banking in the
west. It grew cooler, while within him he was consumed by a burning
thirst. He could hear the ripple of running water, the laughter of it
among pebbles a few yards away. And the river itself became even more
desirable than his medicine case, or his blankets, or his rifle. The
song of it, inviting and tempting him, blotted thought of the other
things out of his mind. And he continued his journey, the swing of the
pendulum in his head becoming harder, but the sound of the river
growing nearer. At last he came to the wet sand, and fell on his face,
and drank.

After this he had no great desire to go back. He rolled himself over,
so that his face was turned up to the sky. Under him the wet sand was
soft, and it was comfortingly cool. The fire in his head died out. He
could hear new sounds in the edge of the forest evening sounds. Only
weak little twitters came from the wood warblers, driven to silence by
thickening gloom in the densely canopied balsams and cedars, and
frightened by the first low hoots of the owls. There was a crash not
far distant, probably a porcupine waddling through brush on his way for
a drink; or perhaps it was a thirsty deer, or a bear coming out in the
hope of finding a dead fish. Carrigan loved that sort of sound, even
when a pendulum was beating back and forth in his head. It was like
medicine to him, and he lay with wide-open eyes, his ears picking up
one after another the voices that marked the change from day to night.
He heard the cry of a loon, its softer, chuckling note of honeymoon
days. From across the river came a cry that was half howl, half bark.
Carrigan knew that it was coyote, and not wolf, a coyote whose breed
had wandered hundreds of miles north of the prairie country.

The gloom gathered in, and yet it was not darkness as the darkness of
night is known a thousand miles south. It was the dusky twilight of day
where the sun rises at three o'clock in the morning and still throws
its ruddy light in the western sky at nine o'clock at night; where the
poplar buds unfold themselves into leaf before one's very eyes; where
strawberries are green in the morning and red in the afternoon; where,
a little later, one could read newspaper print until midnight by the
glow of the sun--and between the rising and the setting of that sun
there would be from eighteen to