The Everlasting Whisper | Page 5

more water, this time filling his one cook-pot. When he
returned Parker was trying to stand. He had drawn himself up, holding
to the tree with both shaking hands, putting his weight gingerly on one
leg. Suddenly his weak hands gave way, he swayed and fell. King,
standing over him, thought at first he was dead, so white and still was
he. But Parker had only fainted.
The sun sank lower; the shadows down about the lake shores thickened

and began to run, more and more swiftly, up the surrounding slopes.
The tall peaks caught the last of the fading light, and like so many
watch-towers blazed across the wilderness. Upward, about their bases,
surged the flooding shadows like a dark tide rising swiftly; the light on
the tallest spire winked and went out; and all of a sudden the rush of air
through the pine tops strengthened and a growing murmur like the
voice of a distant surf made it seem that one could hear the flood of the
night sweeping through gorge and cañon and inundating the world.
And, despite all that Mark King could do, the sunset glow had gone and
the first big star was shining before Andy Parker stirred.
His first call was for water. Then he complained of a terrible pain in his
vitals, a pain that stabbed him through from chest to abdomen.
Thereafter he was never coherent again, though for the most part he
babbled like a noisy brook. He spoke of Swen Brodie and old Loony
Honeycutt and Gus Ingle all in one breath, and King knew that Gus
Ingle was sixty years dead; he dwelt hectically on the "luck of the
unlucky Seven." And when, far on in the night, he at length grew silent
and King went to peer into his face by the light of his camp-fire, Andy
Parker was dead.
* * * * *
Mark King made the grave in the dawn. In his roll, the handle slipped
out so that it might lie snug against the steel head, was a short miner's
pick. A little below where Parker lay in his last wide-eyed vigil under
the stars, King found a fairly level space free of rock and carpeted in
young grass. Here with a pine-tree to mark head and foot, he worked at
the shallow grave. He put his own blanket down, laid the quiet figure
gently upon it, bringing the ends over to cover him. He marked the spot
with a pile of rocks; he blazed the two trees. It was all that he could do;
far more than Andy Parker would have done for him or for any other
man.
The sun was rising when, he made his way to the top of the ridge and
came to stand where he had seen Parker and Swen Brodie side by side.
He clambered on until he came to the very crest over which Swen
Brodie had disappeared. Just where had Brodie gone? He wondered.

The answer came before the question could have been put into words.
Though it was full day across the heights where King stood, it would be
an hour and longer before the sun got down into the cañons and
meadows. He saw the flare of a camp-fire shining bright through the
dark of a low-lying flat two miles or more from his vantage-point.
Brodie would be cooking his breakfast now.
After that King did not again climb up where his body would stand out
against the sky which was filling so brightly with the new morning. He
moved along the ridge steadily and swiftly like a man with a definite
objective who did not care to be spied on. In twenty minutes, after
many a hazardous passage along a steep bare surface, he came to a spot
where the knife edge of the ridge was broken down and blunted into a
fairly level space a hundred yards across. Here was an accumulation of
soil worn down from the granite above, and here, an odd, isolated tuft
of scrawny verdure, grew a small grove of trees, stunted pine and
scraggling brush.
Toward the far end of this upland flat was the disintegrating ruin of a
cabin. The walls had disappeared long ago, save for two or three rotting
logs, but a small rectangle of slightly raised ground indicated how they
had extended. Even the rock chimney had fallen away, but something
of the fireplace, black with burning, stood where labouring hands had
placed it more than half a century before.
Here he made his own breakfast from what was ready cooked in his
pack, dispensing with the fire, which would inevitably tell Brodie of his
presence. For Brodie, callously brutish as he was, must be something
less than human not to turn his