We tell ourselves, we cry that he was happy, happy with us, could he not stay! he was happy while the days he stole to give us ran their course. He sat for hours by the cave door following Terry with his eyes, smiling when she looked at him, evading our questions.

But when we tell each other that he was happy here, we think then that he went away, we could not keep him from going. Should we stay when he has gone? Oh, my mind is vague and filled with doubts. I tell Terry that his mind was made up to go and nothing we could say or do would have weighed with him. In spite of argument we cannot escape the feeling that there is something we could have done or left undone to keep him with us, and save our friend. Or else we should have gone too.

We went back to our cave, alone now, quite alone. The roots I was carrying up the hill when Duncan arrived were lying on the brae where I dropped them to snatch my rifle from my shoulder. I began to gather up the fir. My finger was on the trigger to kill my friend.

‘It was touch and go,’ I said to Terry. ‘What would have happened if it was a stranger? My finger was hard on the trigger.’

‘But it wasn’t a stranger,’ she replied.

‘It wasn’t a stranger,’ I said with a sigh. ‘I can’t get rid of the feeling—’

‘What feeling?’ she inquired when I paused.

‘That I’m a murderer in my heart, that I’m like the thing we ran from to escape.’

‘You’d never have done it,’ she said gently. ‘You think you would, when you look back you imagine it was just chance that saved you. You’d not have done it, Hugh. There’s more than chance.’

We came to the cave. We spread out the things Duncan brought for us on the floor. There were apples and sweets and lettuce from a deserted garden he passed, flour and sugar, salt and a bottle of whisky, a rifle with ammunition and a telescope and a knife.

He did not tell us to come home.

‘Is it a good rifle?’ Terry asked.

‘Too good,’ I answered. ‘His own.’

‘He wouldn’t have stayed whatever we did,’ she cried all of a sudden, and then she appealed to me with, ‘Would he, Hugh?’

I shook my head.

‘Don’t you remember this telescope?’ I asked. ‘He was given it—his name’s on the case.’

He had given us what he would have given his friends if he was about to die.

She commenced to gather the gifts and stow them away.

‘Give me the glass,’ she said. ‘It used to hang by his chair.’

She took the telescope and polished its black worn leather case with her sleeve and hung it beside the fire.