No matter.  They would perhaps at first think he had come to weakly follow them, perhaps they would at first doubt his story.  No matter.  He bit his lips to keep down the foolish rising tears, but still went blindly forward.

He saw not the beautiful night, cradled in the dark hills, swathed in luminous mists, and hushed in the awe of its own loveliness!  Here and there the moon had laid her calm face on lake and overflow, and gone to sleep embracing them, until the whole plain seemed to be lifted into infinite quiet.  Walking on as in a dream, the black, impenetrable barriers of skirting thickets opened and gave way to vague distances that it appeared impossible to reach, dim vistas that seemed unapproachable.  Gradually he seemed himself to become a part of the mysterious night.  He was becoming as pulseless, as calm, as passionless.

What was that?  A shot in the direction of the cabin! yet so faint, so echoless, so ineffective in the vast silence, that he would have thought it his fancy but for the strange instinctive jar upon his sensitive nerves.  Was it an accident, or was it an intentional signal to him?  He stopped; it was not repeated, the silence reasserted itself, but this time with an ominous deathlike suggestion.  A sudden and terrible thought crossed his mind.  He cast aside his pack and all encumbering weight, took a deep breath, lowered his head, and darted like a deer in the direction of the challenge.

II.

The exodus of the seceding partners of the Lone Star claim had been scarcely an imposing one.  For the first five minutes after quitting the cabin the procession was straggling and vagabond.  Unwonted exertion had exaggerated the lameness of some, and feebleness of moral purpose had predisposed the others to obtrusive musical exhibition.  Union Mills limped and whistled with affected abstraction; the Judge whistled and limped with affected earnestness.  The Right Bower led the way with some show of definite design; the Left Bower followed with his hands in his pockets.  The two feebler natures, drawn together in unconscious sympathy, looked vaguely at each other for support.

“You see,” said the Judge, suddenly, as if triumphantly concluding an argument, “there ain’t anything better for a young fellow than independence.  Nature, so to speak, points the way.  Look at the animals.”

“There’s a skunk hereabouts,” said Union Mills, who was supposed to be gifted with aristocratically sensitive nostrils, “within ten miles of this place; like as not crossing the Ridge.  It’s always my luck to happen out just at such times.  I don’t see the necessity anyhow of trapesing round the claim now, if we calculate to leave it to-night.”

Both men waited to observe if the suggestion was taken up by the Right and Left Bower moodily plodding ahead.  No response following, the Judge shamelessly abandoned his companion.