Perhaps it was one of the humors of the camp—­a practical manifestation of the facetious spirit that had found literary expression in the topsy-turvy obituary notice from the pen of Hurdy-Gurdy’s great humorist.  Perhaps it had some occult personal signification impenetrable to understandings uninstructed in local traditions.  A more charitable hypothesis is that it was owing to a misadventure on the part of Mr. Barney Bree, who, making the interment unassisted (either by choice for the conservation of his golden secret, or through public apathy), had committed a blunder which he was afterward unable or unconcerned to rectify.  However it had come about, poor Scarry had indubitably been put into the earth face downward.

When terror and absurdity make alliance, the effect is frightful.  This strong-hearted and daring man, this hardy night worker among the dead, this defiant antagonist of darkness and desolation, succumbed to a ridiculous surprise.  He was smitten with a thrilling chill—­shivered, and shook his massive shoulders as if to throw off an icy hand.  He no longer breathed, and the blood in his veins, unable to abate its impetus, surged hotly beneath his cold skin.  Unleavened with oxygen, it mounted to his head and congested his brain.  His physical functions had gone over to the enemy; his very heart was arrayed against him.  He did not move; he could not have cried out.  He needed but a coffin to be dead—­as dead as the death that confronted him with only the length of an open grave and the thickness of a rotting plank between.

Then, one by one, his senses returned; the tide of terror that had overwhelmed his faculties began to recede.  But with the return of his senses he became singularly unconscious of the object of his fear.  He saw the moonlight gilding the coffin, but no longer the coffin that it gilded.  Raising his eyes and turning his head, he noted, curiously and with surprise, the black branches of the dead tree, and tried to estimate the length of the weather-worn rope that dangled from its ghostly hand.  The monotonous barking of distant coyotes affected him as something he had heard years ago in a dream.  An owl flapped awkwardly above him on noiseless wings, and he tried to forecast the direction of its flight when it should encounter the cliff that reared its illuminated front a mile away.  His hearing took account of a gopher’s stealthy tread in the shadow of the cactus.  He was intensely observant; his senses were all alert; but he saw not the coffin.  As one can gaze at the sun until it looks black and then vanishes, so his mind, having exhausted its capacities of dread, was no longer conscious of the separate existence of anything dreadful.  The Assassin was cloaking the sword.

It was during this lull in the battle that he became sensible of a faint, sickening odor.  At first he thought it was that of a rattle-snake, and involuntarily tried to look about his feet.  They were nearly invisible in the gloom of the grave.  A hoarse, gurgling sound, like the death-rattle in a human throat, seemed to come out of the sky, and a moment later a great, black, angular shadow, like the same sound made visible, dropped curving from the topmost branch of the spectral tree, fluttered for an instant before his face and sailed fiercely away into the mist along the creek.