And Skinny Hill, dead many years ago, was his partner at the bat—­ lovable Skinny, with his smirking grin and his breath that always smelled of the most delicious onions ever raised in Ohio.  And then, at dinner hour, he was trading some of his mother’s cucumber pickles for some of Skinny’s onions—­two onions for a pickle, and never a change in the price.  And he played old-fashioned casino with his mother, and they were picking blackberries together in the woods, and he killed over again a snake that he had clubbed to death more than twenty years ago, while his mother ran away and screamed and then sat down and cried.

He had worshiped that mother, and the spirit of his dreams did not let him look down into the valley where she lay dead, under a little white stone in the country cemetery a thousand miles away, with his father close beside her.  But it gave him a passing thrill of the days in which he had fought his way through college—­and then it brought him into the North, his beloved North.

For hours the wilderness was heavy about Kent.  He moved restlessly, at times he seemed about to awaken, but always he slipped back into the slumberous arms of his forests.  He was on the trail in the cold, gray beginning of Winter, and the glow of his campfire made a radiant patch of red glory in the heart of the night, and close to him in that glow sat O’Connor.  He was behind dogs and sledge, fighting storm; dark and mysterious streams rippled under his canoe; he was on the Big River, O’Connor with him again—­and then, suddenly, he was holding a blazing gun in his hand, and he and O’Connor stood with their backs to a rack, facing the bloodthirsty rage of McCaw and his free-traders.  The roar of the guns half roused him, and after that came pleasanter things—­ the droning of wind in the spruce tops, the singing of swollen streams in Springtime, the songs of birds, the sweet smells of life, the glory of life as he had lived it, he and O’Connor.  In the end, half between sleep and wakefulness, he was fighting a smothering pressure on his chest.  It was an oppressive and torturing thing, like the tree that had fallen on him over in the Jackfish country, and he felt himself slipping off into darkness.  Suddenly there was a gleam of light.  He opened his eyes.  The sun was flooding in at his window, and the weight on his chest was the gentle pressure of Cardigan’s stethoscope.

In spite of the physical stress of the phantoms which his mind has conceived, Kent awakened so quietly that Cardigan was not conscious of the fact until he raised his head.  There was something in his face which he tried to conceal, but Kent caught it before it was gone.  There were dark hollows under his eyes.  He was a bit haggard, as though he had spent a sleepless night.  Kent pulled himself up, squinting at the sun and grinning apologetically.  He had slept well along into the day, and—­

He caught himself with a sudden grimace of pain.  A flash of something hot and burning swept through his chest.  It was like a knife.  He opened his mouth to breathe in the air.  The pressure inside him was no longer the pressure of a stethoscope.  It was real.