Ramsdell, in the next room, had quite a little doze, before once more the voices waked him. "You see," Reed said at last, as if there had been no pause at all; "I was a little in the state those fellows were in, up at the mine. I needed something equivalent to their extreme unction. The cases are analogous; though, after all, I am not sure it would be quite as hard to die into the next world as I'm finding it to die out of this." Whittenden's clear eyes flickered. Then he braced himself and asked the direct question to which his friend, for two long hours, had been so plainly leading. "Reed, do you mean this thing is--permanent?" "Yes." "You know it for a fact?" "Yes." "Since when?" "A month or so." "They told you?" "No. They still keep up the fiction that they can't predict anything with any surety." "Then how do you know?" "How does anybody know it, when more than half of himself is just so much dead matter; when the division line between the dead part and the alive doesn't move along by so much as one hair's breadth; when the dead part is dead past any resurrection? It is my body, Whittenden. I know it for a fact." There was no especial answer to be made. Whittenden had the superlative good sense to attempt none. After a silence, Reed spoke again. "I haven't told anybody of it yet, till now. There was no use, and I dreaded the row they'd be sure to make. Besides, I wanted to tell you, first of all, because you are the one man in reach who has seen me in the thick of things, and I knew there would be any amount of detail you would take in, without my having to explain it to you." The rector nodded. Through his curling smoke-trails, it seemed to him he caught a glimpse of the rugged, ragged Colorado mountains, of a shabby mining camp centring in a group of shafts, of squads of rough-faced miners, and of Reed Opdyke, smiling and alert, striding here and there among them, laying down the law superbly, a king among his loyal and adoring subjects. And now--Whittenden flung back his head, and his clear eyes glowed with his belief. Never more a king than now, as he lay there, quiet, but very potent, establishing his throne above the level of the powers of darkness who murmured threateningly about his feet! And, meanwhile,-- "Queer thing about our bodies," Reed was saying; "queer and almost a little cruel. We drive them at top speed and never think a thing about them, as long as they go on all right. It's when they snap, that we begin to realize all the things they've stood for." Again there came the silence, while the eyes of the two men rested on each other, more eloquent than many words. At last, Reed spoke again.