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It was a long tione before Kent at last fell asleep It was a slu to the last against exhaustion and the inevitable end A strange spirit seeh the years he had lived, even to the days of his boyhood, leaping fro visions of valleys alo faded and indistinct in his hosts that were transformed, as his spirit went back to the with the red blood of reality He was a boy again, playing three-old-cat in front of the little old red brick schoolhouse half a mile from the farm where he was born, and where his o, was his partner at the bat--lovable Skinny, with his srin and his breath that always smelled of the most delicious onions ever raised in Ohio And then, at dinner hour, he was trading some of his mother's cucumber pickles for some of Skinny's onions--two onions for a pickle, and never a change in the price And he played old-fashioned casino with his ether in the woods, and he killed over again a snake that he had clubbed to death o, while his mother ran away and screamed and then sat down and cried
He had worshiped that mother, and the spirit of his dreams did not let him look down into the valley where she lay dead, under a little white stone in the country cemetery a thousand ave hiht his way through college--and then it brought him into the North, his beloved North
For hours the wilderness was heavy about Kent He moved restlessly, at times he seemed about to awaken, but always he slipped back into the slumberous arinning of Winter, and the glow of his calory in the heart of the night, and close to hie, fighting storm; dark andRiver, O'Connor with hiun in his hand, and he and O'Connor stood with their backs to a rack, facing the bloodthirsty rage of McCaw and his free-traders The roar of the guns half roused hi of wind in the spruce tops, the singing of swollen streas of birds, the sweet slory of life as he had lived it, he and O'Connor In the end, half between sleep and wakefulness, he was fighting a s pressure on his chest It was an oppressive and torturing thing, like the tree that had fallen on hi off into darkness Suddenly there was a glea in at his , and the weight on his chest was the gentle pressure of Cardigan's stethoscope