The Rivers End | Page 9

rim of

sheltering trees, the wind was beginning to moan its everlasting
whimper and sob of loneliness. In spite of his clenched hands and 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 brain-fag. And he felt better. His brain
was clearer. He listened to the watch and found its ticking natural. He
braced himself to another effort and whistled as he prepared his
breakfast.
After that he packed his dunnage and continued south. He wondered if
Conniston ever knew his Manual as he learned it now. At the end of the
sixth day he could repeat it from cover to cover. Every hour he made it
a practice to stop short and salute the trees about him. McDowell would
not catch him there.
"I am Derwent Conniston," he kept telling himself. "John Keith is
dead--dead. I buried him back there under the cabin, the cabin built by
Sergeant Trossy and his patrol in nineteen hundred and eight. My name
is Conniston--Derwent Conniston."
In his years of aloneness he had grown into the habit of talking to
himself--or with himself--to keep up his courage and sanity. "Keith, old
boy, we've got to fight it out," he would say. Now it was, "Conniston,
old chap, we'll win or die." After the third day, he never spoke of John
Keith except as a man who was dead. And over the dead John Keith he
spread Conniston's mantle. "John Keith died game, sir," he said to
McDowell, who was a tree. "He was the finest chap I ever knew."
On this sixth day came the miracle. For the first time in many months
John Keith saw the sun. He had seen the murky glow of it before this,
fighting to break through the pall of fog and haze that hung over the
Barrens, but this sixth day it was the sun, the real sun, bursting in all its
glory for a short space over the northern world. Each day after this the
sun was nearer and warmer, as the arctic vapor clouds and frost smoke
were left farther behind, and not until he had passed beyond the ice
fogs entirely did Keith swing westward. He did not hurry, for now