A pitch-filled spruce knot exploded with the startling vividness of a star bomb, and with it came a dull sort of mental shock to Keith.  He was sure that for an instant he had seen Conniston’s face and that the Englishman’s eyes were looking at him as the eyes had looked at him out of the face in the watch.  The deception was so real that it sent him back a step, staring, and then, his eyes striving to catch the illusion again, there fell upon him a realization of the tremendous strain he had been under for many hours.  It had been days since he had slept soundly.  Yet he was not sleepy now; he scarcely felt fatigue.  The instinct of self-preservation made him arrange his sleeping-bag on a carpet of spruce boughs in the tent and go to bed.

Even then, for a long time, he lay in the grip of a harrowing wakefulness.  He closed his eyes, but it was impossible for him to hold them closed.  The sounds of the night came to him with painful distinctness—­the crackling of the fire, the serpent-like hiss of the flaming pitch, the whispering of the tree tops, and the steady tick, tick, tick of Conniston’s watch.  And out on the barren, through the 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.