"Hit!" said he.—"I know, now."
No one said anything to this. After a time he reached out a hand and touched almost timidly the arm of his friend. His voice was laboring and not strong.
"Where's—where's my hat?" he whispered at length.
"Your hat?" said Wid. "Your hat?—Now, why—I reckon it's hanging around somewheres here. What makes you want it?"
But some one had heard the request and came through the little hallway with Sim Gage's hat, brave green cord and all.
The wounded man looked at it and smiled, as sweet a smile as may come to a man's face—the smile of a boy. Indeed, he had lived a life that had left him scarce more than a boy, all these years alone on outskirts of the world.
He motioned to them to put the hat on the bed side him. "I want it here," he said after a time, moving restlessly when they undertook to take it from him.
He touched it with his hand. At length he reached out and dropped it on the chair at the head of his bed, now and again turning and looking at it the best he might, laboring as he did with his torn lungs; looking at it with some strange sort of reverence in his gaze, some tremendous significance.
"Ain't she fine?" he asked of his friend, again with his astonishingly winsome smile; a smile they found hard to look upon.
A half hour later some man down the road said to another that the sagebrusher had croaked too.