The Valley of Silent Men | Page 4

his chest two
weeks before had nicked the arch of the aorta, thus forming an
aneurism, was a statement by Cardigan which did not sound especially
wicked or convincing to him. "Aorta" and "aneurism" held about as
much significance for him as his perichondrium or the process of his
stylomastoid. But Kent possessed an unswerving passion to grip at
facts in detail, a characteristic that had largely helped him to earn the
reputation of being the best man- hunter in all the northland service. So
he had insisted, and his surgeon friend had explained.
The aorta, he found, was the main blood-vessel arching over and
leading from the heart, and in nicking it the bullet had so weakened its
outer wall that it bulged out in the form of a sack, just as the inner tube
of an automobile tire bulges through the outer casing when there is a
blowout.
"And when that sack gives way inside you," Cardigan had explained,
"you'll go like that!" He snapped a forefinger and thumb to drive the
fact home.
After that it was merely a matter of common sense to believe, and now,
sure that he was about to die. Kent had acted. He was acting in the full
health of his mind and in extreme cognizance of the paralyzing shock
he was contributing as a final legacy to the world at large, or at least to
that part of it which knew him or was interested. The tragedy of the
thing did not oppress him. A thousand times in his life he had
discovered that humor and tragedy were very closely related, and that
there were times when only the breadth of a hair separated the two.

Many times he had seen a laugh change suddenly to tears, and tears to
laughter.
The tableau, as it presented itself about his bedside now, amused him.
Its humor was grim, but even in these last hours of his life he
appreciated it. He had always more or less regarded life as a joke--a
very serious joke, but a joke for all that--a whimsical and trickful sort
of thing played by the Great Arbiter on humanity at large; and this last
count in his own life, as it was solemnly and tragically ticking itself off,
was the greatest joke of all. The amazed faces that stared at him, their
passing moments of disbelief, their repressed but at times visible
betrayals of horror, the steadiness of their eyes, the tenseness of their
lips --all added to what he might have called, at another time, the
dramatic artistry of his last great adventure.
That he was dying did not chill him, or make him afraid, or put a
tremble into his voice. The contemplation of throwing off the mere
habit of breathing had never at any stage of his thirty-six years of life
appalled him. Those years, because he had spent a sufficient number of
them in the raw places of the earth, had given him a philosophy and
viewpoint of his own, both of which he kept unto himself without effort
to impress them on other people. He believed that life itself was the
cheapest thing on the face of all the earth. All other things had their
limitations.
There was so much water and so much land, so many mountains and so
many plains, so many square feet to live on and so many square feet to
be buried in. All things could be measured, and stood up, and
catalogued--except life itself. "Given time," he would say, "a single
pair of humans can populate all creation." Therefore, being the cheapest
of all things, it was true philosophy that life should be the easiest of all
things to give up when the necessity came.
Which is only another way of emphasizing that Kent was not, and
never had been, afraid to die. But it does not say that he treasured life a
whit less than the man in another room, who, a day or so before, had
fought like a lunatic before going under an anesthetic for the
amputation of a bad finger. No man had loved life more than he. No

man had lived nearer it.
It had been a passion with him. Full of dreams, and always with
anticipations ahead, no matter how far short realizations fell, he was an
optimist, a lover of the sun and the moon and the stars, a worshiper of
the forests and of the mountains, a man who loved his life, and who had
fought for it, and yet who was ready--at the last--to yield it up without a
whimper when the fates asked for it.
Bolstered up against his pillows, he did not look the part of the fiend he
was confessing himself to be to the people about