But maybe after a while she'll be able to stand thinkin' about him.
She'll get used to the hurt. She'll be able to talk and laugh the way
she used to. Oh, doc, if you could of seen her as I've seen her in the
old days----"
"When the man was with her?" cut in the doctor.
Buck Daniels caught his breath.
"Damn your eternal soul, doc!" he said softly.
And for a time neither of them spoke. Whatever went on in the mind of
Daniels, it was something that contorted his face. As for Byrne, he was
trying to match fact and possibility and he was finding a large gap
between the two; for he tried to visualise the man whose presence had
been food to old Joe Cumberland, and whose absence had taken the oil
from the lamp so that the flame now flickered dimly, nearly out. But he
could build no such picture. He could merely draw together a vague
abstraction of a man to whom the storm and the wild geese who ride the
storm had meaning and relationship. The logic which he loved was
breaking to pieces in the hands of Randall Byrne.
Silence, after all, is only a name, never a fact. There are noises in
the most absolute quiet. If there is not even the sound of the cricket
or the wind, if there are not even ghost whispers in the house, there is
the sigh of one's own breathing, and in those moments of deadly waiting
the beat of the heart may be as loud and as awful as the rattle of the
death-march. Now, between the doctor and the cowpuncher, such a silence
began.
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