There was so much water and so much land, so many mountains and so
many plains, so many square feet to live on and so many square
feet to be buried in. All things could be measured, and stood up,
and catalogued--except life itself. "Given time," he would say, "a
single pair of humans can populate all creation." Therefore, being
the cheapest of all things, it was true philosophy that life
should be the easiest of all things to give up when the necessity
came.

Which is only another way of emphasizing that Kent was not, and
never had been, afraid to die. But it does not say that he
treasured life a whit less than the man in another room, who, a
day or so before, had fought like a lunatic before going under an
anesthetic for the amputation of a bad finger. No man had loved
life more than he. No man had lived nearer it.

It had been a passion with him. Full of dreams, and always with
anticipations ahead, no matter how far short realizations fell, he
was an optimist, a lover of the sun and the moon and the stars, a
worshiper of the forests and of the mountains, a man who loved his
life, and who had fought for it, and yet who was ready--at the
last--to yield it up without a whimper when the fates asked for
it.

Bolstered up against his pillows, he did not look the part of the
fiend he was confessing himself to be to the people about him.
Sickness had not emaciated him. The bronze of his lean, clean-cut
face had faded a little, but the tanning of wind and sun and
campfire was still there. His blue eyes were perhaps dulled
somewhat by the nearness of death. One would not have judged him