No more laying awake nights thinking till my
head hurts and my heart is like a lump of lead. By God, I _have_ been
crazy."
His body began to sag, and Hollister knelt beside him and supported
him. He shook his head when Lawanne offered him a drink. His eyes
closed. Only the feeble motion of his fingers on the dead woman's face
and the slow heave of his breast betokened the life that still clung
so tenaciously to him.
He opened his eyes again, to look at Hollister.
"I used to think--dying--was tough," he whispered. "It isn't. Like
going--to sleep--when you're tired--when you're through--for the day."
That was his last word. He went limp suddenly and slid out of
Hollister's grasp. And they let him lie, a dead man beside the dead
woman on the floor. They stood up themselves and stared at the bodies
with that strange incredulity men sometimes feel in the face of sudden
death.
Both Lawanne and Hollister were familiar with death, death by the
sniper's bullet, by machine gun and shell, by bayonet and poison gas.
This was different.
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