taken away. Remorse and disappointment had shorn him.
The eagle was fallen.
Day after day he sat beside the window in his chair, an old man, a Napoleon on Elba, planning escapes he was impotent to perform, hoping for miracles, and knowing that his doom was to be both certain and slow.
If one ship flew over, another will.
He did not even react to that.
They tried everything to bring him from himself. Their attempts were pitiful--
because in them was the humiliation and misery of their own souls.
McCobb made a special omelet. Eat, a little, Viking. Eat. You've sat there with no food and only your wine for days.
Days.
Henry brought a necklace from the ruins.
Look, father, it's beautiful. A word carved on every stone. Handiwork unparalleled in Egypt or even Greece.
Silence.
They tried mock anger."
Get yourself out of it. This is no behavior for a man.
Words used to children--and he was a child, sitting there and staring at emptiness.
By and by he got up. He shaved. He made his bed. He changed his clothes. He dined with them. He went out in the sun and weeded in the garden.
But he never smiled again.
He seldom spoke.
One day his hair turned snow-white. A pompom of white hair above the crag of his brow.
His steps faltered.
"What shall we do?" Henry asked anxiously of McCobb.
"What can we do, son? His fire has burned out. Like the fires down on the point.
With them."
"But--"
"I know. I know."
"We're no worse off than we were before," Henry insisted. "And that makes twice.
The third time--they'll take us back."
"The third time," McCobb repeated huskily and Henry, looking at him, realized that he, also, was old.
They found Stone on the 6th of June.
He was lying beside his wheelbarrow. He had been carrying manure from the goat corral to the garden.
He looked as if he had fallen asleep.
McCobb, who had come upon him first, summoned Jack.
"He's dead, Jack."
"Yes, Mr. McCobb,"
"Where's Henry?"
"On the bay."
"Ring the bell."
"Yes, Mr. McCobb." The Scotchman met Henry on the porch. "Your father died this afternoon. A heart attack. It must have been instantaneous, and there's no sign of any pain."
Henry walked inside the house and sat down beneath the sections of newspaper which had been framed behind glass that once had formed the bridge windows of the Falcon .
"We all expected it, didn't we?" he said slowly.
"We did, Henry. He's been failing for a long time."
"He was--fairly old."
"Almost seventy."
"Where is he?"
"I--I haven't moved him yet. He fell under that tree with purple flowers."
"Oh."
They went out together--McCobb with his arm encircling Henry's broad back.
They buried Stephen Stone inside the compound at the foot of the huge tree on which he had first laid his hand--the only tree of any size within the confines of the stockade. His headstone was a boulder and on the face of it McCobb fixed a-plate of solid gold:
STEPHEN STONE
The days were long, after that. The house seemed strangely empty.
That emptiness frightened them.
It was in their eyes when they looked at each other.
Next.
It was in Henry's soul when he went to the edge of the sea and whispered to the water: ''I'll be last. I'll be there alone. Alone with three graves. And I shall go mad."
McCobb came after him that day, as he had done once before.
They sat together.
"Any day, now—"
' I'm thirty-one," Henry answered tonelessly. "And I have been waiting all these years for any day."
"The cities"--McCobb murmured his list--"and women."
"Women!"
"Women--laddie--"
Henry rose.
"Why torture me with it? I shall be last. I'll fish here alone. You will lie there and Jack. And I shall laugh and run on the beach and scream like a parrot. I'll never see a woman. I'll never--never--never--"
"Henry!"
"Oh--right. I'm sorry."
His resignation was worse than his anger.
And in his heart McCobb admitted that all he said was true, all he felt was justified.
Chapter
Mary Pope Osborne
Richard Sapir, Warren Murphy
Steve Miller
Davis Ashura
Brian Aldiss
Susan Hahn
Tracey Martin
Mette Ivie Harrison
V. J. Chambers
Hsu-Ming Teo