“Gone?” echoed Granite. “Wall, I allow she’ll come back?”
“No, she has left me forever. She says so.”
“What, in that theer bit o’ writin’?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Power, air you joshin’ me, er what?”
Power drew a deep breath. The dizziness which had benumbed his faculties was passing, and fortunately so; for his sympathetic companion, despairing of obtaining any lucid statement from this dazed man, was stooping to pick up the letter.
“No,” he managed to say. “You must not read that. It is meant for me alone. But give it to me. I—I am afraid of falling. My head——”
Vastly puzzled, the guide handed him the half-folded sheet of paper. The bald explanation that Mrs. Power had “left” her husband “forever” sounded like the wildest variety of moon-madness. In Granite’s own phrase, he had never before clapped eyes on two sich genuwine love-birds as Nancy and Derry, not in all his born nateral, and to be told that one had deserted the other merely went to prove that the speaker had gone plumb crazy. For a time, indeed, he was convinced that Power was suffering from a slight sunstroke, because they had paddled nearly two miles while facing the sun, whose rays were reflected in a glowing path on the surface of the lake. Such attacks, though infrequent, were not unknown in that high region. When reaction set in, and Mrs. Power returned, the patient would become violently sick, and a few hours of complete rest would complete his cure.
“Jest go right inside an’ set yerself daown,” he said cheerfully. “Me an’ the dawg’ll git on Madam’s trail in a brace o’ shakes. We’ll bring her back, you bet, an’ ef you kinder feel as though you’d swallered a live rabbit, wall, let it bolt!”
Power uttered no protest. If he was capable of any definite sensation, it was one of relief that the friendly guide meant to leave him alone. He stumbled into the hut, and collapsed on a chair, burying his face in his hands. He heard Peter’s lively command to the dog, “After her, Guess! Hark to it, Pup! Keep yer nose to the ground, an’ I’ll do the rest,” as if the man’s voice and the eager whimpering of the hound had traveled through a long tunnel before reaching his ears. The sounds of the chase soon died away among the trees. A great silence fell, and seemed to wrap him in a pall that would never unfold again. Fearing lest his brain might yield under the strain, he spread the letter open on the table, and read it many times. At first eyes and mind were equally incapable of mastering its contents; but a subconscious knowledge that he must either understand those vague words or go mad in time enabled their sense to penetrate the gathering mists.