it), returned, took up the chalk, added a line, but rubbed it out
again, repeated this operation a few times until he produced the polite
postscript,--"Hope you'll be better soon." Then he retreated to the
ledge, spread the bear-skin beside the door, and, rolling himself in
a blanket, lit his pipe for his night-long vigil. But Rand, although
a martyr, a philosopher, and a moralist, was young. In less than ten
minutes the pipe dropped from his lips, and he was asleep.


He awoke with a strange sense of heat and suffocation, and with
difficulty shook off his covering. Rubbing his eyes, he discovered that
an extra blanket had in some mysterious way been added in the night; and
beneath his head was a pillow he had no recollection of placing there
when he went to sleep. By degrees the events of the past night forced
themselves upon his benumbed faculties, and he sat up. The sun was
riding high; the door of the cabin was open. Stretching himself, he
staggered to his feet, and looked in through the yawning crack at the
hinges. He rubbed his eyes again. Was he still asleep, and followed by
a dream of yesterday? For there, even in the very attitude he remembered
to have seen her sitting at her luncheon on the previous day, with her
knitting on her lap, sat Mrs. Sol Saunders! What did it mean? or had she
really been sitting there ever since, and all the events that followed
only a dream?

A hand was laid upon his arm; and, turning, he saw the murky black eyes
and Indian-inked beard of Sol beside him. That gentleman put his finger
on his lips with a theatrical gesture, and then, slowly retreating in
the well-known manner of the buried Majesty of Denmark, waved him, like
another Hamlet, to a remoter part of the ledge. This reached, he grasped
Rand warmly by the hand, shook it heartily, and said, "It's all right,