nscious 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 It is completely out of date now, that song,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