ely still, staring at him in stupefied surprise. Daddy
John, his neck craned round the blaze, surveyed him with bright, sharp
eyes of unemotional query, then flopped the bacon pan on the embers,
and said:

"He's all done."

Courant advanced a step, looked down on him and threw a sidelong glance
at Susan, bold with meaning. After her first moment of amazement, she
moved to David's side, drew the edge of the blanket over him, touched
his head with a light caress, and turned back to the fire. The plates
and cups were lying there and she quietly set them out, her eye now and
then straying for a needed object, her hand hanging in suspended search
then dropping upon it, and noiselessly putting it in its place.
Unconsciously they maintained an awed silence, as if they were sitting
by the dead. Daddy John turned the bacon with stealthy care, the
scrape of his knife on the pan sounding a rude and unseemly intrusion.
Upon this scrupulously maintained quietude the man's weeping broke
insistent, the stifled regular beat of sobs hammering on it as if
determined to drive their complacency away and reduce them to the low
ebb of misery in which he lay.

They had almost finished their meal when the sounds lessened, dwindling
to spasmodic, staggering gasps with lengthening pauses that broke
suddenly in a quivering intake of breath and a vibration of the
recumbent frame. The hysterical paroxysm was over. He lay limp and
turned his head on his arms, too exhausted to feel shame for the shine
of tears on his cheek. Susan took a plate of food and a coffee cup and
stole toward him, the two men watching her under their eyelids. She
knelt beside him and spoke very gently, "Will you take this, David?
You'll feel stronger after you've eaten."

"Put it down," he said hoarsely, without moving.

"Shall I give you the coffee?" She hung over him looking into his
face. "I can hold the cup and you can drink it."

"By and by," he muttered.

She bent lower and laid her hand on his hair.

"David, I'm so sorry," she breathed.

Courant leaped to his feet and walked to where his horses stood. He
struck one of them a blow on the flank that after the silence and the
low tones of the girl's crooning voice sounded as violent as a pistol
shot. They all started, even David lifted his head.

"What's the matter now?" said Daddy John, alert for any outbreak of man
or beast.

But Courant made no answer, and moved away into the plain. It was so