I stumbled away blindly. When I returned some minutes later he was propped quite comfortably at the end of the bunk.
"Beg pardon, chief—" I began.
"Hey?"
"Mr. Sutton can't come just now. I—I didn't care to disturb him—"
"How's that?"
"Well, it seems—the fact is—I—I left him in his cabin on his knees, and it looked—anyway it seemed to me as if he might, perhaps, be—praying!"
For the first time in my knowledge of him, his normal self, the chief smiled, and it was like the struggling ray of early sun that pierces the gray dawn. I should have left him then with that last glint of a picture to close the affair, and with Sutton's last word of it in my mind. "He's forgotten!" he had cried to me, in a clear bell note. "We did make him forget!"
I say I should have gone away with that image and that word. But just at the instant I saw a curious thing—and heard another. From the spot where Sutton had dropped it, Chris Wickwire had retrieved the book. He opened the volume on his knee and turned it around and over with a gesture entirely casual.
"Aye," he said, as he settled himself contentedly on his pillow. "Aye—well, I'll just sit here with this for a while. It's a grand book, beyond the pen o' men an' angels; I often wunner how I got along without one. Ye've no notion what comfort I've found just to sit an' haud in my twa hands such a staff o' immortal truth!"...
Had he forgotten? Had he anything or any need to forget? I could not tell: but this I know and this I saw while he twinkled at me through a puff of smoke before I fled from the doorway, that the book on his knee as he turned it and rippled its worn pages—the book, I say, was right side up!