He now regarded the cake itself uncertainly.  It was surely perfect cake.  He broke a fragment from the thin edge and tasted it almost fearfully.  It wasn’t going right.  He persisted with a larger fragment, but upon this he was like to choke; his mouth was dry and curiously no place for even the choicest cake.  He wondered about it in something like panic, staring at it in puzzled consternation.  There was the choice thing and he couldn’t eat it.  Then he became aware that his eyes were hot, the lids burning; and there came a choking, even though he no longer had any cake in his mouth.  Suddenly he knew that he couldn’t eat the cake because he had lost his brother—­his brother who had passed on.  He gulped alarmingly as the full knowledge overwhelmed him.  He was wishing that Merle had kept the knife, even if it wasn’t such a good knife, so he would have something to remember him by.  Now he would have nothing.  He, Wilbur, would always remember Merle, even if he was no longer a twin, but Merle would surely forget him.  He had passed on.

Over by the little house he heard the bark of Frank, the dog.  Frank’s voice was changing, and his bark was now a promising baritone.  His owner tried to whistle, but made poor work of this, so he called, “Here, Frank!  Here, Frank!” reckless of betraying his own whereabouts.  His voice was not clear, it still choked, but it carried; Frank came bounding to him.  He had a dog left, anyway—­a good fighting dog.  His eyes still burned, but they were no longer dry, and his gulps were periodic, threatening a catastrophe of the most dreadful sort.

Frank, the dog, swallowed the cake hungrily, eating it with a terrible ease, as he was wont to eat enemy dogs.

CHAPTER VIII

Midsummer faded into late summer, and Dave Cowan was still small-towning it.  To the uninformed he might have seemed a staff, fixed and permanent, to Sam Pickering and the Newbern Center Advance.  But Sam was not uninformed.  He was wise in Dave’s ways; he knew the longer Dave stayed the more casually would he flit; an hour’s warning and the Advance would be needing a printer.  So Sam became aware on a day in early September that he would be wise to have a substitute ready.  He knew the signs.  Dave would become abstracted, stand longer and oftener at the window overlooking the slow life of Newbern.  His mind would already be off and away.  Then on an afternoon he would tell Sam that he must see a man in Seattle, and if Sam had taken forethought there would be a new printer at the case next day.  The present sojourn of Dave’s had been longer than any Sam Pickering could remember, for the reason, it seemed, that Dave had been interested in teaching his remaining son a good loose trade.