to stand close about his master. Yes, such a man must
die alone."

All through the night Nashola lay awake, thinking of what he had
heard. Secotan was, he knew, a man of powerful magic, but he could not
forget that there was a look in his eyes and a kindliness in his tone
that seemed human, after all. Must he suffer and die there, without
help, merely because he was greater and wiser than the rest? Or, when
death came close and the host of unearthly beings gathered about him,
would he not feel it of comfort to have a living friend by his side?
It was long past midnight and in the black darkness that comes before
day, before the boy came to final resolution.

He crawled out from under the shelter of his lodge and slipped
noiselessly through the sleeping camp. Every rustle in the grass,
every stirring leaf in the thicket made him jump and shiver, yet he
kept steadily on. The sharp outline of Secotan's pointed lodge poles
stood out against the stars, halfway up the shoulder of the hill. The
door showed black and open as he came near, but there was no sound
from within. The only thing that seemed alive was a dull, glowing coal
in the ashes of a fire that was not quite dead. The boy stooped down
before the door and spoke in a shaking voice:

"Secotan, Secotan, do you still live?"

A hollow, gasping whisper sounded from the shadows within:

"I am living, but death is very near."

Nashola stood still for a moment. He could picture that gaunt figure
lying helpless on the ground, with the darkness all about peopled by
strange shapes visible to the sorcerer's eyes alone, crowding spirits
come to carry him away to an unknown world. But even as a wave of icy
terror swept over him, he remembered how fearful it would be to lie
all alone in that haunted darkness, and he bent low and slipped
through the door.

"I know that all the spirits of the earth and air and water are with
you," he said as he felt his way to the deerskin bed and sat down
beside it, "but I thought, among them all, you might wish for a friend
beside you who was flesh and blood."

A quivering hand was laid for an instant on his knee.

"There is no man who does not feel terror when he comes to die alone,"
the medicine man whispered, "and Secotan is less of a man than you."

Through the dragging hours Nashola sat beside him, listening with
strained ears to every sound--the soft moving of a snake through the
grass before the door, the nibbling of a field mou