Silence, after all, is only a name, never a fact.  There are noises in the most absolute quiet.  If there is not even the sound of the cricket or the wind, if there are not even ghost whispers in the house, there is the sigh of one’s own breathing, and in those moments of deadly waiting the beat of the heart may be as loud and as awful as the rattle of the death-march.  Now, between the doctor and the cowpuncher, such a silence began.  Buck Daniels wanted nothing more in the world than to be out of that room, but the eye of the doctor held him, unwilling.  And there began once more that eternal waiting, waiting, waiting, which was the horror of the place, until the faint creakings through the windshaken house took on the meaning of footsteps stalking down the hall and pausing at the door, and there was the hushing breath of one who listened and smiled to himself!  Now the doctor became aware that the eye of Buck Daniels was widening, brightening; it was as if the mind of the big man were giving way in the strain.  His face blanched.  Even the lips had no colour, and they moved, gibberingly.

“Listen!” he said.

“It is the wind,” answered the doctor, but his voice was hardly audible.

“Listen!” commanded Daniels again.

The doctor could hear it then.  It was a pulse of sound obscure as the thudding of his heart.  But it was a human sound and it made his throat close up tightly, as if a hand were settling around his wind-pipe.  Buck Daniels rose from his chair; that half-mad, half-listening look was still in his eyes—­behind his eyes.  Staring at him the doctor understood, intimately, how men can throw their lives away gloriously in battle, fighting for an idea; or how they can commit secret and foul murder.  Yet he was more afraid of that pulse of sound than of the face of Buck Daniels.  He, also, was rising from his chair, and when Daniels stalked to the side door of the room and leaned there, the doctor followed.

Then they could hear it clearly.  There was a note of music in the voice; it was a woman weeping in that room where the chain lay on the floor, coiled loosely like a snake.  Buck Daniels straightened and moved away from the door.  He began to laugh, guarding it so that not a whisper could break outside the room, and his silent laughter was the most horrible thing the doctor had ever seen.  It was only for a moment.  The hysteria passed and left the big man shaking like a dead leaf.

“Doc,” he said, “I can’t stand it no longer.  I’m going out and try to get him back here.  And God forgive me for it.”

He left the room, slamming the door behind him, and then he stamped down the hall as if he were trying to make a companion out of his noise.  Doctor Randall Byrne sat down to put his thoughts in order.  He began at the following point:  “The physical fact is not; only the immaterial is.”  But before he had carried very far his deductions from this premise, he caught the neighing of a horse near the house; so he went to the window and threw it open.  At the same time he heard the rattle of galloping hoofs, and then he saw a horseman riding furiously into the heart of the wind.  Almost at once the rider was lost from sight.