softly, holding Lance's hand, but pointing to
the hearth. "Yes," said Lance, with the faintest of smiles on the palest
of faces. "You feel sorry for any one that's dead, don't you?" Fairley
nodded again. Lance looked at him with eyes as remote as his own, shook
his head, and turned away. When he reached the door he laid his revolver
carefully, and, indeed, somewhat ostentatiously, upon a chair. But when
he stepped from the threshold he stopped a moment in the light of the
open door to examine the lock of a small derringer which he drew from
his pocket. He then shut the door carefully, and with the same slow,
hesitating step, felt his way into the night.

He had but one idea in his mind, to find some lonely spot; some spot
where the footsteps of man would never penetrate, some spot that would
yield him rest, sleep, obliteration, forgetfulness, and, above all,
where HE would be forgotten. He had seen such places; surely there were
many,--where bones were picked up of dead men who had faded from the
earth and had left no other record. If he could only keep his senses now
he might find such a spot, but he must be careful, for her little feet
went everywhere, and she must never see him again alive or dead. And in
the midst of his thoughts, and the darkness, and the storm, he heard a
voice at his side, "Lance, how long you have been!"

*****

Left to himself, the old man again fell into a vacant contemplation
of the dead body before him, until a stronger blast swept down like an
avalanche upon the cabin, burst through the ill-fastened door and broken
chimney, and, dashing the ashes and living embers over the floor, filled
the room with blinding smoke and flame. Fairley rose with a feeble cry,
and then, as if acted upon by some dominant memory, groped under the
bed until he found his buckskin bag and his precious crystal, and
fled precipitately from the room. Lifted by this second shock from his
apathy, he returned to the fixed idea of his life,--the discovery and
creation of the diamond,--and forgot all else. The feeble grasp that his
shaken intellect kept of the events of the night relaxed, the disguised
Lance, the story of his son, the murder, slipped into nothingness; there
remained only the one idea, his nightly watch by the diamond pit. The
instinct of long habit was stronger than the darkness or the onset of
the storm, and he kept his tottering way over stream and fallen timber
until he reached the spot. A sudden tre