“The knife!” he said hoarsely. “The knife!”
At that he fell backward, panting for breath.
All the splendid color left Faye Duncan’s cheeks as she bent over his prostrate form and began struggling with the buttons of his mackinaw and shirt.
“It’s his heart,” she said. “There’s nothing much we can do. He’ll come round presently. But some day—”
She did not finish, but the wrinkles that came in her brow told all.
“But what does it mean?” said Johnny pointing to the hilt of a hunting knife that protruded a short two inches from the trunk of the pine. “Must have been there twenty years. A few years more and it would have been completely buried.”
If Faye Duncan knew what that knife meant and why it had stirred up such violent emotions in her grandfather’s breast, she did not say so. She sat staring at the thing that had brought tragedy so near.
Giving up the problem, Johnny kindled a small fire, then put water on to boil for coffee.
Presently the old man sat up to stare dully about him. The instant his eyes fell upon the knife hilt they were alight once more.
“Twenty-one years!” he muttered, pressing his forehead once more. “Twenty-one years! All these years, and now I have found it—perhaps too late.”