“He ain’t come,” said the old man.  “Dan ain’t here.”

The others exchanged glances, but the eyes of Kate dropped sadly and fastened again upon the hearth.

Buck Daniels cleared his throat like an orator.

“Nobody but a fool,” he said, “would have started out of Elkhead in a storm like this.”

“Weather makes no difference to Dan,” said Joe Cumberland.

“But he’d think of his hoss——­”

“Weather makes no difference to Satan,” answered the faint, oracular voice of Joe Cumberland.  “Kate!”

“Yes?”

“Is he comin’?”

She did not answer.  Instead, she got up slowly from her place by the fire and took another chair, far away in the gloom, where hardly a glimmer of light reached to her and there she let her head rest, as if exhausted, against the back of the seat.

“He promised,” said Buck Daniels, striving desperately to keep his voice cheerful, “and he never busts his promises.”

“Ay,” said the old man, “he promised to be back—­but he ain’t here.”

“If he started after the storm,” said Buck Daniels.

“He didn’t start after the storm,” announced the oracle.  “He was out in it.”

“What was that,” cried Buck Daniels sharply.

“The wind,” said Kate, “for it’s rising.  It will be a cold night, to-night.”

“And he ain’t here,” said the old man monotonously.

“Ain’t there things that might hold him up?” asked Buck, with a touch of irritation.

“Ay,” said the old rancher, “they’s things that’ll hold him up.  They’s things that’ll turn a dog wild, too, and the taste of blood is one of ’em!”

The silence fell again.

There was an old clock standing against the wall.  It was one of those tall, wooden frames in which, behind the glass, the heavy, polished disk of the pendulum, alternated slowly back and forth with wearisome precision.  And with every stroke of the seconds there was a faint, metallic clangor in the clock—­a falter like that which comes in the voice of a very old man.  And the sound of this clock took possession of every silence until it seemed like the voice of a doomsman counting off the seconds.  Ay, everyone in the room, again and again, took up the tale of those seconds and would count them slowly—­fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three—­and on and on, waiting for the next speech, or for the next popping of the wood upon the hearth, or for the next wail of the wind that would break upon the deadly expectancy of that count.  And while they counted each looked straight before him with wide and widening eyes.

Into one of these pauses the voice of Buck Daniels broke at length; and it was a cheerless and lonely voice in that large room, in the dull darkness, and the duller lights.

“D’you remember Shorty Martin, Kate?”

“I remember him.”

He turned in his chair and hitched it a little closer to her until he could make put her face, dimly, among the shadows.  The flames jumped on the hearth, and he saw a picture that knocked at his heart.