Those dictated letters to the family! Great Scott! How self-conscious and bookish they were. Daylight wrote every line of them, affirmed Allen Blynn.
Dawn was slowly touching the edge of a New Jersey pine wood; but Gorgas was not at all aware of that. Never had sleep seemed so foreign to her needs.
Breathlessly she read on until within a page or two of the end.
“What does he mean? What does he mean?” she fingered the scant leaves that remained. “He said there was another—‘There is—and there isn’t at all,’ he said.”
The end came abruptly. It was dated only a few weeks ago. Before he had left for his lecture trip he had had a casual talk with Leopold, he wrote. What Leopold really said is not recorded—Leopold was too honest a man to have lied—but, nevertheless, Allen Blynn came away with the certain impression that the long vigil had come to naught. Poets, lovers and madmen have such seething brains!
“I have climbed to my ‘Top-o’-the-hill,’” wrote Allen; “beyond is Canaan, but it is not for me.”
“How could he? How could he?” Gorgas whispered. “This is terrible, Allen Blynn.” Solicitude for her man quite outweighed her own loss.
She read on: “Within sight of the promised land I must die and be buried in the Valley of Moab,” he wrote on the final page. “What sin I have committed I know not.... And now you will never find me out, my child. Your birthday gift—this book of absurd confessions—must be buried with me.
“‘And Jehovah showed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan and all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the South, and the Plain of the Valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar.... And He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab; but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’”