a
roaring and a crashing filled his ears. It was the castle of his hopes
crashing down in ruins. So this, then was why the sequence of letters
had been so abruptly broken off. She had lacked the courage to tell him
of her faithlessness; she had chosen the course of silence, leaving him
to learn of the treachery through other sources. It was cruelty piled
upon cruelty compounded.

For such a sorry ending he had cut four years out of his life. For this
reward of all his constancy he had endured what had been wellnigh
unendurable--loneliness, homesickness, isolation, discomfort. For this
he had kept his body clean and his soul clean where all about him was
sloth and slackness. He thought backward upon that which he had
undergone; he thought forward upon the dreary purposeless prospect that
stretched unendingly before him. Never now could he bring himself to go
back to the spot of his shattered dreams. And to him that was the one
place in all the world worth going back to.

He put his face down upon his crossed arms, and presently there began to
escape from him strangled sobs sounding most grotesquely like some
strange mimicry of the name the native girls had for him--"Pooh-pooh,
pooh-pooh, pooh-pooh," over and over again repeated. Beyond his doorstep
the life of the station hummed and throbbed, quickened into joyous
activity by the coming of the steamer. He was not conscious of it. That
roaring still was in his ears.

Now between his racking sobs he began to pray aloud a broken prayer. He
did not pray for divine forgiveness of the thing he meant to do. By the
narrow tenets of his faith his soul, through the deliberate act of his
hands, would go forth from the body, doomed to everlasting torment. It
did not appear feasible to him that God might understand. The God he
believed in was a stern God of punishments, sitting in strict judgment
upon mortal transgressions. So he prayed not for mercy but for strength
to carry him through that which faced him.

In a cupboard in the inner room was a single-barreled, muzzle-loading
fowling piece made at Liege, in Belgium, many years before. His
predecessor in the station had left it behind him and Pratt had
succeeded to possession of it. He knew how to load and fire and clean
it. Occasionally he had used it in shooting at wood pigeons. He went
inside and took it from its place and charged it with black powder from
an old-fashioned metal powder flask and with heavy shot from a worn