e poor Argentine woman's hard pillow.

Toffy lay with wide-open eyes, and there were great beads of
perspiration on his forehead which Hopwood wiped away from time to
time. He breathed with difficulty in short gasps, and still he never
spoke. It came upon Peter with a horrible sinking of the heart that he
might die before a doctor came, and without saying one word to him.
All the compunction of a heart that was perhaps unusually womanly and
tender was raging within him for not having taken better care of the
boy. He wanted to say so much to Toffy, and to beg his forgiveness,
and to ask if there was anything in the world he could do for him, and
he hoped wildly and pitifully that he was not in pain. But the dying
man's eyes were fixed on the bare walls of the hut and on the little
shrine of the Virgin in the corner of the room, and it seemed now as if
the mistiness of death were settling upon them, so that they saw
nothing.

Ross went restlessly to and fro, now entering the room for a few
minutes, and then going out again to scan the distant country to see if
by any chance the camp doctor was coming.

When Toffy at last spoke he went and stood outside the hut, and an
instinct caused him to bare his head for a moment.

Just at the end Toffy said something, and his voice sounded a great way
off, and almost as though it came from another land. 'Is Kitty there?'
he said.

'No; it is me, old man,' said Peter thickly.

He was holding the boy's head now, for his breathing was becoming more
difficult, and he stooped and kissed him on the forehead. He felt the
chill of it, and, startled, he called out, almost as one calls out a
message to a friend departing on a journey, raising his voice a little,
for Toffy already seemed a long way off, 'I never knew--I never knew,
Toffy--that you had been hit, or I would have stopped.'

'I didn't want to spoil the race,' said Toffy. 'I don't often win a
race,' he said, and with that he died.

CHAPTER XVI

They carried him home in the evening when the sun had set, and on the
day following, according to the custom of the country, they buried him.
Some peons dug the grave in a corner of the little estate, and sawed
planks and made a railing round it, and Ross read the Burial Service
over him from Toffy's own Prayer Book, and Peter kept the well-worn
Bible for Kitty Sherard.

Peter sought solitude where he could. His grief was of the kind which
can be borne only in solit