“You can't live on fever any longer. The fever has left you, and you'll go with it if you don't obey your doctor.”
“But where's all the stuff gone to?”
“There were four of them, and they allowed for some delay in getting out,” Paul explained, with a sickly smile.
“Well, they was hogs! I knew how they'd pan out! That was why”—He wearied of speech and left the point unfinished.
On the evening following, when the two could no longer see each other's faces in the dusk, Paul spoke, controlling his voice:—
“I need not ask you, John, what you think of our chances?”
“I guess they ain't much worth thinking about.” The fire hissed and crackled; the soft subsidence of the snow could be heard outside.
“We are 'free among the dead,' how does it go? 'Like unto them that are wounded and lie in the grave.' What we say to each other here will stop here with our breath. Let us put our memories in order for the last reckoning. I think, John, you must, at some time in your life, have known my father, Adam Bogardus? He was lost on the Snake River plains, twenty-one years ago this autumn.”
Receiving no answer, the pale young inquisitor went on, choosing his words with intense deliberation as one feeling his way in the dark.
“Most of us believe in some form of communication that we can't explain, between those who are separated in body, in this world, but closely united in thought. Do I make myself clear?”