a summer evening we had wandered here!
How often had our ponies come tramping home side by side, in the days
when we brought the cows in late from the farthest draw! It seemed like
another world now.

"Phil, you are very good to me. Don't pity me! I can't stand that." We
never had a tenor in our choir with a voice so clear and rich as his.

"I don't pity you, Dave, I envy you." I spoke with an effort. "You have
not lost, you have only begun a long journey. There is joy at the end of
it."

"Oh, that is easy for you to say, who have everything to make you
happy."

"I? Oh, Dave! I have not even a grave." The sudden sense of loss, driven
back by the thought of another's sorrow, swept over me again. It was
his turn now to forget himself.

"What is it, Phil? Have you and Marjie quarrelled? You never were meant
for that, either of you. It can't be."

"No, Dave. I don't know what is wrong. I only wish--no, I don't. It is
hard to be a man with the heart of a boy still, a foolish boy with
foolish ideals of love and constancy. I can't talk to-night, Dave, only
I envy you the sure possession, the eternal faith that will never be
lost."

He pressed my hand in his left hand. His right arm had had only a
limited usefulness since the night he tried to stop Jean Pahusca down by
the mad floods of the Neosho. I have never seen him since we parted on
the prairie that August evening. The next day he went to Red Range to
stay for a short time. By the end of a week I had left Springvale, and
we are to each other only boyhood memories now.

Out on the open prairie, where there was room to think and be alone, I
went to fight my battle. There was only a sweep of silver sky above me
and a sweep of moonlit plain about me. Dim to the southwest crept the
dark shadow of the wooded Fingal's Creek Valley, while against the
horizon the big cottonwood tree was only a gray blur. The mind can act
swiftly. By the time the moon had swung over the midnight line I had
mapped out my course. And while I seemed to have died, and another being
had my personality, with only memory the same in both, I rose up armed
in spirit to do a man's work in the world. But it cost me a price. I
have been on a battle field with a thousand against fifty, and I was one
of the fifty. Such a strife as I pray Heaven may never be in our land
again. I have looked Death in the face day after day creeping slowly,
surely toward me while I must march forward to meet it. Did the