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The mound had not been there long; neither snow or rain had yet touched it; it was still strange to the men in the doorway, who saw it vividly now, at time of sunrise. Though thus early, each man sat idly smoking, an open book reversed on the knee.

De Young first broke the silence.

“We must do something, or else decide to do nothing about Clark’s mail.” He shifted in his seat, looking away from the open door.

“I don’t know–whether–it would be kinder to tell them or not.”

A coughing fit shook Morris, and answering, a twitch as of pain tightened the corners of his companion’s eyes. Minutes passed, and Morris sat limply in his chair, before he answered,

“I thought at first we’d better write; now it seems different. Let’s wait until we go back.”

Neither of the men looked at the other. They seldom did now; it was useless pain. Filled with the incomparable optimism of the consumptive, neither man realized his own condition, but marked the days of his friend. Morris, unbelieving, spoke of his friend’s return; yet, growing weaker each day himself, spoke in all hope and conviction of his future work, recording each day his mode of successful treatment, despite interruptions of coughing which left him breathless and trembling for minutes. De Young saw, and in pity marvelled; yet, seeing, and as a physician knowing, he not for a moment applied the gauge to himself.

Nature, in sportive mood, commands the Angel of Death, who with matchless legerdemain, keeps the mirror of illusion, unsuspected, before the consumptive’s eyes; and, seeing, in derision the satirist smiles.

Unavoidably acting parts, the two friends found a barrier of artificiality separating them, making each happier when alone. Thus day after day, monotonous, unchanging, went by. Not another person entered their door. From the little town a man at periods brought provisions and their mail, but the house was acquiring an uncanny reputation. They were not understood, and such are ever foreign. With the passage of time and the coming of the mound in the dooryard, the feeling had developed into positive fear, and travellers avoided the place as though warned by a scarlet placard.

Morris grew weaker daily. At last the disillusionment that precedes death came to him. The artificial slipped from both men and a nearness like that of brothers, joined them. They spoke not of the future but of the past. Years slipped aside and left them back in the midst of active, brain-satisfying practice. Over again they performed operations, where life and death were separated but by a hair’s width. Again, with eyes that brightened and breath that came more quickly, they lived their successes, and hand in hand, as children in the dark, told of their failures, and the tale was long, for they were but men.

The end came quietly. A hemorrhage, a big spot of blood on the cover, a firm hand pressure, and Morris’s parting words,

“Save my notes.”

That night De Young knew no sleep. “I must finish the work,” he said, in lame excuse. Well he knew there could be no rest for him that night. He did his task thoroughly, making record of things that had passed, with the precision of a physician who knows a patient but as material.

A tramp, who, unknowing, had taken shelter in an outbuilding, waking in the night, saw the light. Moved by curiosity, he crawled up softly in the darkness, and peeped in at the window. In the half light he saw on the bed a thin, white face motionless in the expression which even he knew was death; and at the table, writing rapidly with manuscript all about, a man whose eyes shone with the brilliancy of disease, and with a face as pale as the face on the pillow. In the blank, unreasoning terror of superstition, he fled until Nature rebelled and would carry him no farther. Next day to all he saw, he told the tale of supernatural things which lingers yet around a prairie ruin, in whose dooryard are mounds built of man.