"It may be so. Anyway, 'tis for us to be doin'. I'll bide along wi' un, an' you slip it back quicker'n you comed. Run for your life, or his'n, to the farm, an' tell what's failed, an' send folks here an' a man 'pon a hoss for a doctor, an' bid 'em bring brandy."
Collins spoke with extraordinary passivity. He received this tremendous impression with grief indeed, but no shock. Fear before any plain, daylight event, however horrible, his nature was incapable of suffering; only the night unnerved him.
"Go!" he said. "Doan't stand starin', an' keep out of Missis Stapledon's way, but see the men. An' tell Pinsent, or the bwoy, to bring a gun along wi' 'em. 'Twas his dyin' deed to try an' put thicky sheep out of sufferin'; an' I'll see 'tis done my awn self, for respect of the man."
Gregory answered nothing, but departed. In the excitement of this event he forgot his own pending discomfiture and escape. But he remembered these things half-way back to Little Silver. Then he had time for personal satisfaction.
"'Tis a ill wind as blaws gude to none," he thought.
And the other ordered the body of his master in seemly pose, and placed a pillow of fern under the battered skull, and sat down and waited. Not all the mellow sunset light could bring warmth to the face of Myles Stapledon. An evening wind blew over the Moor; the mist, generating and growing visible at close of day, stole here and there, and spread silver curtains, and wound about her familiar playthings of granite. She hid the heath, and transformed the stone, brushed by the living, and glazed the placid eyes of the dead.
With profound respect, but no active emotion of sorrow, Henry Collins sat and watched; yet bitter mourning did not lack, for the great red dog still ran up and down, nosed his master, then lifted up his voice and howled as the cold truth struck into him. His wonderful eyes imaged a world of misery and his face showed agonies far more acute than the moonlike countenance of the man.
But Collins had come correctly to the truth, and, in his speech, accurately described an incident that here, upon thresholds of renewed hope and peace, had ended the days of Myles Stapledon.
At sudden cry from a brute in pain above him, Myles climbed Watern, realised the sheep's sad plight, and immediately essayed to throw it down, that its miseries might be ended. But at unguessed personal disadvantages, from a protracted fast and recent physical exertions, the man over-estimated his strength, nor took account of the serious difficulties attending such a climb. Half-way to the ledge, he grew suddenly giddy, and, for the first time, realised that though he might descend, return must be for him impossible. A desperate effort to get back proved futile; he slipped, struggled, slipped again, and found his hands and arms powerless to serve or save. And then he heard the unexpected Message and knew that his hours were told.
Now he slept where he had fallen, below the unchanging granite. His life was done with; its tribulations and sunrise of new hope alike quenched. Yet no pang of mental sorrow marked his dead face, and physical suffering was likewise absent from it. The man lay calm of feature, contented of aspect. His eyebrows were arched and normal, his hands were unflexed. One had guessed that he made no effort to question the mandate, but rather, in a phrase of Aurelius, had yielded up life with serenity complete as His who issued the discharge.