For the first time in his life that night, he was afraid to pray,—­afraid even to give thanks that others were sleeping in the room with him so that he could hear their breathing and know that he was not alone.

He was up betimes to press on to the south, again afraid to pray, and dreading what was still in store for him.  For sooner or later he would have to be alone in the night.  Thus far since that day in the Meadows he had slept near others, whether in cabins or in camp, in some freighter’s wagon or bivouacking in the snows of Echo Canon.  Each night he had been conscious, at certain terrible moments of awakening, that others were near him.  He heard their breathing, or in the silence a fire’s light had shown him a sleeping face, the lines of a form, or an arm tossed out.  What would happen on the night he found himself alone, he knew not—­death, or the loss of reason.  He knew what the torture would be,—­the shrieks of women in deadly terror, the shrill cries of children, the low, tense curses of men, the rattle of shots, the yells of Indians, the heavy, sickening smell of blood, the still forms fallen in strange positions of ease, the livid faces distorted to grins.  He had not been able to keep the sounds from his ears, but thus far the things themselves had stayed behind him, moving always, crawling, writhing, even stepping furtively close at his back, so that he could feel their breath on his neck.  When the time came that these should move around in front of him, he thought it would have to be the end.  They would go before him, a wild, bleeding, raving procession, until they tore his heart from his breast.  One sight he feared most of all,—­a bronzed arm with a wide silver bracelet at the wrist, the hand clutching and waving before him heavy strands of long, yellow hair with a gory patch at the end,—­living hair that writhed and undulated to catch the light, coiling about the arm like a golden serpent.

His way lay through the Meadows, yet he hardly realised this until he was fairly on the ground in the midst of a thousand evil signs of the day.  Here, a year after, were skulls and whitening bones, some in heaps, some scattered through the sage-brush where the wolves had left them.  Many of the skulls were pierced with bullet-holes, shattered as by heavy blows, or cleft as with a sharp-edged weapon.  Even more terrifying than these were certain traces caught here and there on the low scrub oaks along the way,—­children’s sunbonnets; shreds of coarse lace, muslin, and calico; a child’s shoe, the tattered sleeve of a woman’s dress—­all faded, dead, whipped by the wind.

He pressed through it all with set jaws, trying to keep his eyes fixed upon the ground beyond his horse’s head; but his ears were at the mercy of the cries that rang from every thicket.