mor seemed to shake the lambent
flame that had lured him on. He thought he heard the sound of voices;
there were signs of recent disturbance,--footprints in the sawdust! With
a cry of rage and suspicion, Fairley slipped into the pit and sprang
toward the nearest opening. To his frenzied fancy it had been tampered
with, his secret discovered, the fruit of his long labors stolen from
him that very night. With superhuman strength he began to open the pit,
scattering the half-charred logs right and left, and giving vent to the
suffocating gases that rose from the now incandescent charcoal. At times
the fury of the gale would drive it back and hold it against the sides
of the pit, leaving the opening free; at times, following the blind
instinct of habit, the demented man would fall upon his face and bury
his nose and mouth in the wet bark and sawdust. At last, the paroxysm
past, he sank back again in his old apathetic attitude of watching,
the attitude he had so often kept beside his sylvan crucible. In this
attitude and in silence he waited for the dawn.

It came with a hush in the storm; it came with blue openings in the
broken up and tumbled heavens; it came with stars that glistened first,
and then paled, and at last sank drowning in those deep cerulean lakes;
it came with those cerulean lakes broadening into vaster seas, whose
shores expanded at last into one illimitable ocean, cerulean no more,
but flecked with crimson and opal dyes; it came with the lightly lifted
misty curtain of the day, torn and rent on crag and pine top, but always
lifting, lifting. It came with the sparkle of emerald in the grasses,
and the flash of diamonds in every spray, with a whisper in the
awakening woods, and voices in the traveled roads and trails.

The sound of these voices stopped before the pit, and seemed to
interrogate the old man. He came, and, putting his finger on his lips,
made a sign of caution. When three or four men had descended he bade
them follow him, saying, weakly and disjointedly, but persistently: "My
boy--my son Robert--came home--came home at last--here with Flip--both
of them--come and see!"

He had reached a little niche or nest in the hillside, and stopped and
suddenly drew aside a blanket. Beneath it, side by side, lay Flip and
Lance, dead, with their cold hands clasped in each other's.

"Suffocated!" said two or three, turning with horror toward the broken
up and still smouldering pit.

"Asleep!" said the ol