It was the face of a young
girl--a schoolgirl, Keith thought, of ten or twelve. Yet the eyes
seemed older; they seemed pleading with someone, speaking a message
that had come spontaneously out of the soul of the child. Keith closed
the watch. Its tick, tick, tick rose louder to his ears. He dropped it
in his pocket. He could still hear it.
A pitch-filled spruce knot exploded with the startling vividness of a
star bomb, and with it came a dull sort of mental shock to Keith. He
was sure that for an instant he had seen Conniston's face and that the
Englishman's eyes were looking at him as the eyes had looked at him out
of the face in the watch. The deception was so real that it sent him
back a step, staring, and then, his eyes striving to catch the illusion
again, there fell upon him a realization of the tremendous strain he
had been under for many hours. It had been days since he had slept
soundly. Yet he was not sleepy now; he scarcely felt fatigue. The
instinct of self-preservation made him arrange his sleeping-bag on a
carpet of spruce boughs in the tent and go to bed.
Even then, for a long time, he lay in the grip of a harrowing
wakefulness. He closed his eyes, but it was impossible for him to hold
them closed.
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