At last, when his leg-weary horse was beginning to stumble a bit, he saw, as he came around a turn, Massacre Mountain’s dark head rising in front of him, only half a mile away.  The spring trickled its low song, as musical, as limpidly pure as if it had never run scarlet.  The picketed horse fell to browsing and Miles sighed restfully as he laid his head on his saddle and fell instantly to sleep with the light of the moon on his damp, fair hair.  But he did not sleep long.  Suddenly with a start he awoke, and sat up sharply, and listened.  He heard the horse still munching grass near him, and made out the shadow of its bulk against the sky; he heard the stream, softly falling and calling to the waters where it was going.  That was all.  Strain his hearing as he might he could hear nothing else in the still night.  Yet there was something.  It might not be sound or sight, but there was a presence, a something—­he could not explain.  He was alert in every nerve.  Suddenly the words of the hymn he had been singing in the afternoon flashed again into his mind, and, with his cocked revolver in his hand, alone, on guard, in the midnight of the savage wilderness, the words came that were not even a whisper: 

    God shall charge His angel legions
      Watch and ward o’er thee to keep;
    Though thou walk through hostile regions,
      Though in desert wilds thou sleep.

He gave a contented sigh and lay down.  What was there to worry about?  It was just his case for which the hymn was written.  “Desert wilds”—­that surely meant Massacre Mountain, and why should he not sleep here quietly, and let the angels keep their watch and ward?  He closed his eyes with a smile.  But sleep did not come, and soon his eyes were open again, staring into blackness, thinking, thinking.

It was Sunday when he started out on this mission, and he fell to remembering the Sunday nights at home—­long, long ago they seemed now.  The family sang hymns after supper always; his mother played, and the children stood around her—­five of them, Miles and his brothers and sisters.  There was a little sister with brown hair about her shoulders, who always stood by Miles, leaned against him, held his hand, looked up at him with adoring eyes—­he could see those uplifted eyes now, shining through the darkness of this lonely place.  He remembered the big, home-like room; the crackling fire; the peaceful atmosphere of books and pictures; the dumb things about its walls that were yet eloquent to him of home and family; the sword that his great-grandfather had worn under Washington; the old ivories that another great-grandfather, the Admiral, had brought from China; the portraits of Morgans of half a dozen generations which hung there; the magazine table, the books and books and books.  A pang of desperate homesickness suddenly shook him.  He wanted them—­his own.  Why should he, their best-beloved, throw away his life—­a life filled to the brim with hope