Mount Lassen, when he sent a comfort-seeking glance that way, sent up a spurt of grayish black smoke with a vicious suddenness that made him jump.  With bulging eyes he watched it mount higher and higher until he held his breath in fear that it would never stop.  He saw the column halt and spread and fall....

When it was over he became conscious of itching palms where his nails had dug into them and left little red marks.  He discovered that he was shaking as with a nervous chill, and that his knees were bending under him.  He sent a wild-eyed glance to the still, purple lake down there where the snowbanks lingered, though it was the middle of May; to the far hills that were purpling already with the dropping of the sun behind the high peaks; to the manzanita slope where the trail lay in shadow now.  It was terribly still and empty—­this piled wilderness.

He turned and hurried into his little glass-sided house and shut the door behind him.  A red beam of the sinking sun shone in and laid a bar of light across the chart like a grin.

The silence was terrible.  The emptiness pressed upon him like a weight that crushed from him his youth and his strength and all his youthful optimism, and left him old and weak and faded, a shadow of humanity like those shadows down there in the canyon.

Stealthily, as if he were afraid of some tangible shape reaching out of the silence, his hand went to the telephone receiver.  He clutched it as drowning fingers clutch at seaweed.  He leaned and jerked the receiver to his ear, and waited for the human voice that would bring him once more into the world of men.  He did not know then that the telephone was the kind that must be rung by the user; or if he had been told that he had forgotten.  So he waited, his ears strained to catch the heavenly sound of a human voice.

Shame crept in on the panic of his soul; shame and something that stiffened it into the courage of a man.  He felt his cheeks burn with the flush that stained them, and he slowly lowered the receiver into its hook.

With his hands thrust deep into his pockets and his mouth pulled down at the corners, he stood leaning back against the desk shelf and forced himself to look down across the wooded slopes to the valley, where a light twinkled now like a fallen star.  After a while he found that he could see once more the beauty, and not so much the loneliness.  Then, just to prove to himself that he was not going to be bluffed by the silence, he began to whistle.  And the tune carried with it an impish streak of that grim humor in which, so they tell us, the song was born.  It is completely out of date now, that song, but then it was being sung around the world.  And sometimes it was whistled just as Jack was whistling it now, to brace a man’s courage against the press of circumstances.

“It’s a long way to Tipperary,” sang Jack, when he had whistled the chorus twice; and grinned at the joke upon himself.  After that he began to fuss with the oil stove and to experiment with the food they had left him, and whistled deliberately all the while.