arily, with no knowledge of
what he was saying: "I wish I could go to sleep--I wish it was
daybreak, now!"

Yet he was almost sober again when Steve shook him awake at four the
next morning, his first inquiry concerning the state of the weather
proving that he recalled their plans of the night before. But his
politeness had given way to a pallid stubbornness that would not budge
an inch until he had had a drink and filled a pair of flasks with all
that the fresh bottle from the medicine chest contained. He refused
breakfast with sickened finality; declined even the coffee which Steve
tried to press upon him. When the latter handed him Joe's rifle and a
handful of extra shells, however, his eagerness to be away showed in
his eyes.

Steve did not like that gleam any more than he understood it, and he
did not understand it at all. It went around him--through him--much as
though Garry was peering cunningly at a far-off, bodiless something
which the other man could not see. And throughout the whole morning
Steve was conscious of it whenever they met after skirting a swamp, or
slipped noiselessly over a hardwood knoll, to rejoin each other. The
day was half gone before Steve realized that it was the telltale sign
of a brain no longer sober, even though Garry's body continued to
maintain an incredible steadiness.

Long after it seemed that eyes such as his had become must needs be
sightless the latter went on picking his way carefully over rough bits
of going; when he had reached a condition where he no longer heard the
word or two which, now and then, Steve addressed to him, he still
flattened his body and crouched at the expected nearness of game. It
became an uncanny exhibition of mechanics after a while--a
sleep-walking sort of thing which wore upon Steve's nerves until he was
more than once at the point of taking possession of Joe's repeater.
And yet it was Garry who jumped a spike-horn buck, just before
nightfall. It was he who fired twice before Steve's rifle reached his
shoulder. But they found only blood on the leaves when they hastened
forward.

"You hit him!" Steve leaned over to examine those crimson stains.
"You must have found him with both shots, judging from the way he's
bleeding. He's gone into that cedar swamp; he won't travel far, and I
hate to let him crawl in there, wounded like that, to die."

Indecisively he paused, not sure just what to do. In that moment of
quiet Garry lifted a flask