his
fighting determination to hold it off, Keith fancied that he heard
again--riding strangely in that wind--the sound of Conniston's voice.
And suddenly he asked himself: What did it mean? What was it that
Conniston had forgotten? What was it that Conniston had been trying to
tell him all that day, when he had felt the presence of him in the
gloom of the Barrens? Was it that Conniston wanted him to come back?

He tried to rid himself of the depressing insistence of that thought.
And yet he was certain that in the last half-hour before death entered
the cabin the Englishman had wanted to tell him something and had
crucified the desire. There was the triumph of an iron courage in those
last words, "Remember, old chap, you win or lose the moment McDowell
first sets his eyes on you!"--but in the next instant, as death sent
home its thrust, Keith had caught a glimpse of Conniston's naked soul,
and in that final moment when speech was gone forever, he knew that
Conniston was fighting to make his lips utter words which he had left
unspoken until too late. And Keith, listening to the moaning of the
wind and the crackling of the fire, found himself repeating over and
over again, "What was it he wanted to say?"

In a lull in the wind Conniston's watch seemed to beat like a heart in
its case, and swiftly its tick, tick, ticked to his ears an answer,
"Come back, come back, come back!"

With a cry at his own pitiable weakness, Keith thrust the thing far
under his sleeping-bag, and there its sound was smothered. At last
sleep overcame him like a restless anesthesia.

With the break of another day he came out of his tent and stirred the
fire. There were still bits of burning ember, and these he fanned into
life and added to their flame fresh fuel. He could not easily forget
last night's torture, but its significance was gone. He laughed at his
own folly and wondered what Conniston himself would have thought of his
nervousness. For the first time in years he thought of the old days
down at college where, among other things, he had made a mark for
himself in psychology. He had considered himself an expert in the
discussion and understanding of phenomena of the mind. Afterward he had
lived up to the mark and had profited by his beliefs, and the fact that
a simple relaxation of his mental machinery had so disturbed him last
night amused him now. The solution was easy. It was his mind struggling
to equilibrium after four years of brai