He did sleep, and never more soundly than now, when safety required that he should be most on the alert.  But there is a limit to the endurance of the most iron natures, and the outlaw had overpassed his bounds of strength.  He was exhausted by trying and prolonged excitements, and completely broken down by physical efforts which would have destroyed most other men outright.  His subdued demeanor—­his melancholy—­were all due to this condition of absolute exhaustion.  He slept, not a refreshing sleep, but one in which the excited spirit kept up its exercises, so as totally to neutralize what nature designed as compensation in his slumbers.  His sleep was the drowse of incapacity, not the wholesome respite of elastic faculties.  It was actual physical imbecility, rather than sleep; and, while the mere animal man, lay incapable, like a log, the diseased imagination was at work, conjuring up its spectres as wildly and as changingly, as the wizard of the magic-lanthorn evokes his monsters against the wall.

His limbs writhed while he slept.  His tongue was busy in audible speech.  He had no secrets, in that mysterious hour, from night, and silence, and his dreary rocks.  His dreams told him of no other auditors.

The hunter, who had found and raised the curtain that separated his chamber from the gloomy gorges of the crag, paused, and motioned his comrades back, while he listened.  At first there was nothing but a deep and painful breathing.  The outlaw breathed with effort, and the sigh became a groan, and he writhed upon the bed of moss which formed his usual couch in the cavern.  Had the spectator been able to see, the lamp suspended from a ring in the roof of the cavern, though burning very dimly, would have shown him the big-beaded drops of sweat that now started from the brows of the sleeper.  But he could hear; and now a word, a name, falls from the outlaw’s lips—­it is followed by murmured imprecations.  The feverish frame, tortured by the restless and guilt-goading spirit, writhed as he delivered the curses in broken accents.  These, finally, grew into perfect sentences.

“Dying like a dog, in her sight!  Ay, she shall see it!  I will hiss in her ears as she gazes—­’It is my work! this is my revenge!’ Ha! ha! where her pride then?—­her high birth and station?—­wealth, family?  Dust, shame, agony, and death!”

Such were the murmured accents of the sleeping man, when they were distinguishable by the hunter, who, crouching, beneath the curtain, listened to his sleeping speech.  But all was not exultation.  The change from the voice of triumph to that of woe was instantaneous; and the curse and the cry, as of one in mortal agony, pain or terror, followed the exulting speech.