Then the doctor went down to the dinner table prepared to keep one eye upon Buck Daniels and the other upon Kate Cumberland.  But if he expected to learn through conversation at the table he was grievously disappointed, for Buck Daniels ate with an eye to strict business that allowed no chatter, and the girl sat with a forced smile and an absent eye.  Now and again Buck would glance up at her, watch her for an instant, and then turn his attention back to his plate with a sort of gloomy resolution; there were not half a dozen words exchanged from the beginning to the end of the meal.

After that they went in to the invalid.  He lay in the same position, his skinny hands crossed upon his breast, and his shaggy brows were drawn so low that the eyes were buried in profound shadow.  They took positions in a loose semi-circle, all pointing towards the sick man, and it reminded Byrne with grim force of a picture he had seen of three wolves waiting for the bull moose to sink in the snows:  they, also, were waiting for a death.  It seemed, indeed, as if death must have already come; at least it could not make him more moveless than he was.  Against the dark wall his profile was etched by a sharp highlight which was brightest of all on his forehead and his nose; while the lower portion of the face was lost in comparative shadow.

So perfect and so detailed was the resemblance to death, indeed, that the lips in the shadow smiled—­fixedly.  It was not until Kate Cumberland shifted a lamp, throwing more light on her father, that Byrne saw that the smile was in reality a forcible compression of the lips.  He understood, suddenly, that the silent man on the couch was struggling terribly against an hysteria of emotion.  It brought beads of sweat out upon the doctor’s tall forehead; for this perfect repose suggested an agony more awful than yells and groans and struggles.  The silence was like acid; it burned without a flame.  And Byrne knew, that moment, the quality of the thing which had wasted the rancher.  It was this acid of grief or yearning which had eaten deep into him and was now close to his heart.  The girl had said that for six months he had been failing.  Six months!  Six eternities of burning at the stake!

He lay silent, waiting; and his resignation meant that he knew death would come before that for which he waited.  Silence, that was the key-note of the room.  The girl was silent, her eyes dark with grief; yet they were not fixed upon her father.  It came thrilling home to Byrne that her sorrow was not entirely for her dying parent, for she looked beyond him rather than at him.  Was she, too, waiting?  Was that what gave her the touch of sad gravity, the mystery like the mystery of distance?

And Buck Daniels.  He, also, said nothing.  He rolled cigarettes one after another with amazing dexterity and smoked them with half a dozen Titanic breaths.  His was a single-track mind.  He loved the girl, and he bore the sign of his love on his face.  He wanted her desperately; it was a hunger like that of Tantalus, too keen to be ever satisfied.  Yet, still more than he looked at the girl, he, also, stared into the distance.  He, also, was waiting!