process of his
stylomastoid. But Kent possessed an unswerving passion to grip at facts
in detail, a characteristic that had largely helped him to earn the
reputation of being the best man-hunter in all the northland service.
So he had insisted, and his surgeon friend had explained.

The aorta, he found, was the main blood-vessel arching over and leading
from the heart, and in nicking it the bullet had so weakened its outer
wall that it bulged out in the form of a sack, just as the inner tube
of an automobile tire bulges through the outer casing when there is a
blowout.

"And when that sack gives way inside you," Cardigan had explained,
"you'll go like that!" He snapped a forefinger and thumb to drive the
fact home.

After that it was merely a matter of common sense to believe, and now,
sure that he was about to die. Kent had acted. He was acting in the
full health of his mind and in extreme cognizance of the paralyzing
shock he was contributing as a final legacy to the world at large, or
at least to that part of it which knew him or was interested. The
tragedy of the thing did not oppress him. A thousand times in his life
he had discovered that humor and tragedy were very closely related, and
that there were times when only the breadth of a hair separated the
two. Many times he had seen a laugh change suddenly to tears, and tears
to laughter.

The tableau, as it presented itself about his bedside now, amused him.
Its humor was grim, but even in these last hours of his life he
appreciated it. He had always more or less regarded life as a joke--a
very serious joke, but a joke for all that--a whimsical and trickful
sort of thing played by the Great Arbiter on humanity at large; and
this last count in his own life, as it was solemnly and tragically
ticking itself off, was the greatest joke of all. The amazed faces that
stared at him, their passing moments of disbelief, their repressed but
at times visible betrayals of horror, the steadiness of their eyes, the
tenseness of their lips--all added to what he might have called, at
another time, the dramatic artistry of his last great adventure.

That he was dying did not chill him, or make him afraid, or put a
tremble into his voice. The contemplation of throwing off the mere
habit of breathing had never at any stage of his thirty-six years of
life appalled him. Those years, because he had spent a sufficient
number of them in the raw places of the earth, had given him a
p