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Updated: June 6, 2025
From that time until he came into possession of Conniston's timepiece he was his own hour-glass and his own alarm clock. He became proficient. Brady's bed and the Circe-breasted pillows that supported his head were his undoing.
The girl raised her head and put her two hands to his face, looking at him with eyes which Keith no longer failed to recognize. They were the eyes that had looked at him out of the faded picture in Conniston's watch. "Kiss me, Derry!" It was impossible not to obey. Her lips clung to him. There was love, adoration, in their caress.
"Then you remember that; don't overlook it for a minute, wakin' or sleepin'. It'll explain a whole lot." When they rode into the camp at Little Rome the two hundred men employed there were just beginning to stir. Conniston's eyes took in with no little interest the details of the camp.
In his years of aloneness he had grown into the habit of talking to himself or with himself to keep up his courage and sanity. "Keith, old boy, we've got to fight it out," he would say. Now it was, "Conniston, old chap, we'll win or die." After the third day, he never spoke of John Keith except as a man who was dead. And over the dead John Keith he spread Conniston's mantle.
But I know what it meant, I know what your stand cost you, and I am prouder to have known you, to feel that outside of our business relations I can say that William Conniston, Junior, is my friend, than I have ever been in my life to have known any other man!" His voice was deep with sincerity, alive with an intensity of feeling which drove a warm flush into Conniston's tanned face.
He knew what it was now that had pulled him back, he knew why Conniston's troubled face had traveled with him over the Barrens, and there surged over him with a sickening foreboding, a realization of what it was that Conniston had remembered and wanted to tell him when it was too late. In the hall beyond the secretary's room Shan Tung waited.
Lonesome Pete whipped one of the guns from his sagging belt and laid it close to Conniston's pillow. "That when a man's got one of them where he can find it easy he ain't got to take nothin' off'n nobody! An' one man's jest as good as another, whether he's foreman or a thirty-dollar puncher! An' bein' as we got to go to work early in the mornin', I reckon you better roll over an' hit the hay!"
Now he was swaying helplessly, hopelessly. But still the dogged spirit within him was undefeated. A strange sort of respect, involuntary, of mingled admiration and pity; surged into Conniston's heart. He was not angry, he had not been angry from the beginning. This was merely a bit of his duty, a part of the day's work, the beginning of regeneration, the keeping of a promise.
Before they had ridden a mile down the mountainous road Conniston heard Kent whistle softly, and ahead of them, coming to meet them, saw a light pole buggy swiftly approaching. A moment later and the man driving had stopped his horses and was looking with small, shrewd eyes into Conniston's. He was a short man, round of face, round of eyes, round of stomach.
And Keith, listening to the moaning of the wind and the crackling of the fire, found himself repeating over and over again, "What was it he wanted to say?" In a lull in the wind Conniston's watch seemed to beat like a heart in its case, and swiftly its tick, tick, ticked to his ears an answer, "Come back, come back, come back!"
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