they thought was shorter, and first
thing you know the party was scattered, and the man that hated Brady
was left alone, lopin' along on a side trail that slanted across the
prairie to the country of the Loup Fork Pawnees.

"That was the last they saw of him and it was a long time--news
traveled slow on the plains in them days--before anybody heard of him
for he never come to St. Louis to tell. Some weeks later a party of
trappers passin' near the Pawnee villages on the Loup Fork was hailed
by some Indians and told they had a paleface sick in the chief's tent.
The trappers went there and in the tent found a white man, clear
headed, but dyin' fast.

"It was the man that killed Brady. Lyin' there on the buffalo skin, he
told them all about it--how he done it and the lie he fixed up. Death
was comin', and the way he'd hated so he couldn't keep his hand from
murder was all one now. He wanted to get it off his mind and sorter
square himself. When he'd struck out alone he went on for a spell,
killin' enough game and always hopin' for the sight of the river. Then
one day he caught his gun in a willow tree and it went off, sending the
charge into his thigh and breaking the bone. He was stunned for a
while and then tried to move on, tried to crawl. He crawled for six
days and at the end of the sixth found a place with water and knowed
he'd come to the end of his rope. He tore a strip off his blanket and
tied it to the barrel of his rifle and stuck it end up. The Pawnees
found him there and treated him kind, as them Indians will do
sometimes. They took him to their village and cared for him, but it
was too late. He wanted to see a white man and tell and then die
peaceful, and that's what he done. While the trappers was with him he
died and they buried him there decent outside the village."

The speaker's voice ceased and in the silence the others turned to look
at the black shape of the island riding the gleaming waters like a
funeral barge. In its dark isolation, cut off from the land by the
quiet current, it seemed a fitting theater for the grim tragedy. They
gazed at it, chilled into dumbness, thinking of the murderer moving to
freedom under the protection of his lie, then overtaken, and in his
anguish, alone in the silence, meeting the question of his conscience.

Once more the words came back to David: "Behold, He that keepeth Israel
shall neither slumber nor sleep."

Susan pressed against her father, awe