"Good-bye, old John-partner!" he murmured.
"You've escaped into the light at last. We'll go home together now,
but we'll come back again."
And with his father's body in his strong arms he departed from the
little amphitheatre, walking lightly with his heavy burden down the
old skid-road to the waiting automobile. And two days later John
Cardigan returned to rest forever--with his lost mate among the
Giants, himself at last an infinitesimal portion of that tremendous
silence that is the diapason of the ages.
When the funeral was over, Shirley and Bryce lingered until they
found themselves alone beside the freshly turned earth. Through a
rift in the great branches two hundred feet above, a patch of
cerulean sky showed faintly; the sunlight fell like a broad golden
shaft over the blossom-laden grave, and from the brown trunk of an
adjacent tree a gray squirrel, a descendant, perhaps, of the gray
squirrel that had been wont to rob Bryce's pockets of pine-nuts
twenty years before, chirped at them inquiringly.
"He was a giant among men," said Bryce presently. "What a fitting
place for him to lie!" He passed his arm around his wife's shoulders
and drew her to him. "You made it possible, sweetheart."
She gazed up at him in adoration. And presently they left the Valley
of the Giants to face the world together, strong in their faith to
live their lives and love their loves, to dream their dreams and
perchance when life should be done with and the hour of rest at hand,
to surrender, sustained and comforted by the knowledge that those
dreams had come true.
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