I was covered with sweat. I knew that I had been an instant from death. Was this the gentle Cabot I had known? " Harrison!" he cried. "Harrison Smith!" He lifted me easily to my feet, his words rapid and stumbling, trying to reassure me. "I" m sorry," he kept saying, "Forgive me! Forgive me, Old Man!"

We looked at one another.

He thrust out his hand impulsively, apologetically. I took it and we shook hands. I" m afraid my grip was a bit weak, and that my hand shook a little. "I" m really frightfully sorry," he said.

There was a knot of people who had gathered, standing a safe distance away on the sidewalk.

He smiled, the ingenuous boyish smile I remembered from New Hampshire. "Would you like a drink?" he asked.

I smiled too. "I could use one," I said.

In a small bar in midtown Manhattan, little more than a doorway and a corridor, Tarl Cabot and I renewed our friendship. We talked of dozens of things, but neither of us mentioned his abrupt response to my greeting, nor did we speak of those mysterious months in which he had disappeared in the mountains of New Hampshire.

In the ensuing months, my studies permitting, we saw one another fairly often. I seemed to answer a desparate need for human fellowship in that lonely man, and, for my part, I was more than happy to count myself his friend — unfortunately perhaps, his only friend.

I felt that the time would come when Cabot would speak to me of the mountains but that he himself would have to choose that time. I was not eager to intrude into his affairs, or his secrets as the case might be. It was enough to be once more his friend. I wondered upon occasion why Cabot did not speak to me more openly on certain matters, why he so jealously guarded the mystery of those months in which he had been absent from the college. I now know why he did not speak sooner. He feared I would have thought him mad.