“One in a litter, that’s just about the average,” Bennington, the Yukoner, replied promptly, but in a voice hoarsely unrecognisable.

“And you must never travel alone with them,” Captain Tom went on.  “For if you fall down they’ll jump you.  Larabee’s brutes only respect a man when he stands upright on his legs.  When he goes down, he’s meat.  I remember coming over the divide from Tanana to Circle City.  That was before the Klondike strike.  It was in ’94 ... no, ’95, and the bottom had dropped out of the thermometer.  There was a young Canadian with the outfit.  His name was it was ... a peculiar one ... wait a minute it will come to me....”

His voice ceased utterly, though his lips still moved.  A look of unbelief and vast surprise dawned on his face.  Followed a sharp, convulsive shudder.  And in that moment, without warning, he saw Death.  He looked clear-eyed and steady, as if pondering, then turned to Polly.  His hand moved impotently, as if to reach hers, and when he found it, his fingers could not close.  He gazed at her with a great smile that slowly faded.  The eyes drooped as the life went out, and remained a face of quietude and repose.  The ukulele clattered to the floor.  One by one they went softly from the room, leaving Polly alone.

From the veranda, Frederick watched a man coming up the driveway.  By the roll of the sea in his walk, Frederick could guess for whom the stranger came.  The face was swarthy with sun and wrinkled with age that was given the lie by the briskness of his movements and the alertness in the keen black eyes.  In the lobe of each ear was a tiny circlet of gold.

“How do you do, sir,” the man said, and it was patent that English was not the tongue he had learned at his mother’s knee.  “How’s Captain Tom?  They told me in the town that he was sick.”

“My brother is dead,” Frederick answered.

The stranger turned his head and gazed out over the park-like grounds and up to the distant redwood peaks, and Frederick noted that he swallowed with an effort.

“By the turtles of Tasman, he was a man,” he said, in a deep, changed voice.

“By the turtles of Tasman, he was a man,” Frederick repeated; nor did he stumble over the unaccustomed oath.

THE ETERNITY OF FORMS

A strange life has come to an end in the death of Mr. Sedley Crayden, of Crayden Hill.

Mild, harmless, he was the victim of a strange delusion that kept him pinned, night and day, in his chair for the last two years of his life.  The mysterious death, or, rather, disappearance, of his elder brother, James Crayden, seems to have preyed upon his mind, for it was shortly after that event that his delusion began to manifest itself.

Mr. Crayden never vouchsafed any explanation of his strange conduct.  There was nothing the matter with him physically; and, mentally, the alienists found him normal in every way save for his one remarkable idiosyncrasy.  His remaining in his chair was purely voluntary, an act of his own will.  And now he is dead, and the mystery remains unsolved.