the years had seemed like a
lifetime to him. There would not be many changes. Everything would be
the same--everything--except--the old home. That home he and his father
had planned, and they had overseen the building of it, a chateau of
logs a little distance from the town, with the Saskatchewan sweeping
below it and the forest at its doors. Masterless, it must have seen
changes in those four years. Fumbling in his pocket, his fingers
touched Conniston's watch. He drew it out and let the firelight play on
the open dial. It was ten o'clock. In the back of the premier half of
the case Conniston had at some time or another pasted a picture. It
must have been a long time ago, for the face was faded and indistinct.
The eyes alone were undimmed, and in the flash of the fire they took on
a living glow as they looked at Keith. It was the face of a young
girl--a schoolgirl, Keith thought, of ten or twelve. Yet the eyes
seemed older; they seemed pleading with someone, speaking a message
that had come spontaneously out of the soul of the child. Keith closed
the watch. Its tick, tick, tick rose louder to his ears. He dropped it
in his pocket. He could still hear it.

A pitch-filled spruce knot exploded with the startling vividness of a
star bomb, and with it came a dull sort of mental shock to Keith. He
was sure that for an instant he had seen Conniston's face and that the
Englishman's eyes were looking at him as the eyes had looked at him out
of the face in the watch. The deception was so real that it sent him
back a step, staring, and then, his eyes striving to catch the illusion
again, there fell upon him a realization of the tremendous strain he
had been under for many hours. It had been days since he had slept
soundly. Yet he was not sleepy now; he scarcely felt fatigue. The
instinct of self-preservation made him arrange his sleeping-bag on a
carpet of spruce boughs in the tent and go to bed.

Even then, for a long time, he lay in the grip of a harrowing
wakefulness. He closed his eyes, but it was impossible for him to hold
them closed. The sounds of the night came to him with painful
distinctness--the crackling of the fire, the serpent-like hiss of the
flaming pitch, the whispering of the tree tops, and the steady tick,
tick, tick of Conniston's watch. And out on the barren, through the rim
of sheltering trees, the wind was beginning to moan its everlasting
whimper and sob of loneliness. In spite of his clenched hands and