taken to following him with his faded old eyes, had even spoken
once of retiring and turning all the work over to him. Was it
possible that David did not want him to go back to Norada?

He bent over and felt the sick man's pulse. It was stronger, not
so rapid. The mechanical act took him back to his first memory of
David.

He had been lying in a rough bunk in the mountain cabin, and David,
beside him on a wooden box, had been bending forward and feeling
his pulse. He had felt weak and utterly inert, and he knew now
that he had been very ill. The cabin had been a small and lonely
one, with snow-peaks not far above it, and it had been very cold.
During the day a woman kept up the fire. Her name was Maggie, and
she moved about the cabin like a thin ghost. At night she slept
in a lean-to shed and David kept the fire going. A man who seemed
to know him well--John Donaldson, he learned, was his name--was
Maggie's husband, and every so often he came, about dawn, and
brought food and supplies.

After a long time, as he grew stronger, Maggie had gone away, and
David had fried the bacon and heated the canned tomatoes or the
beans. Before she left she had written out a recipe for biscuits,
and David would study over it painstakingly, and then produce a
panfull of burned and blackened lumps, over which he would groan
and agonize.

He himself had been totally incurious. He had lived a sort of
animal life of food and sleep, and later on of small tentative
excursions around the room on legs that shook when he walked. The