While he had been under the forest, with an occasional squirrel or chipmunk to arrest his gaze, and with all things as familiar to sight as the environments of the house in which he was accustomed to live, Saul had felt the vigour of the morning, and eaten his cold fat bacon, sitting on the cart, without discontent.  But now it was afternoon—­which, we all know, brings a somewhat more depressing air—­and the budless thickets stood so close, so still, Saul became conscious that his load was a corpse.  He had hoped, in a dull way, to fall in with a companion on this made road; the chances were against it, and the chances prevailed.  Saul ate more bread and bacon.  He had to walk now, and often to give the cart a push, so that the way was laborious; but, curiously enough, it was not the labour he objected to, but the sound of his own voice.  All the way the silent thicket was listening to his “Gee-e, gee; haw then";—­“yo-hoi-eest”; yet, as he and his oxen progressed further into the quiet afternoon, he gradually grew more and more timid at the shouts he must raise.  It seemed to him that the dead man was listening, or that unknown shapes or essences might be disturbed by his voice and rush out from the thicket upon him.  Such fears he had—­wordless fears, such as men never repeat and soon forget.  Rough, dull, hardy woodman as he was, he felt now as a child feels in the dark, afraid of he knew not what.

The way was very weary.  He trudged on beside the cart.  Something went wrong with one of his boots, and he stopped the oxen in order to take it off.  The animals, thus checked, stood absolutely still, hanging down their heads in an attitude of rest.  The man went behind the cart and sat on its edge.  He leaned on the end of the coffin as he examined the boot.  When that was put right he could not deny himself the luxury of a few minutes’ rest.  The oxen, with hanging heads, looked as if they had gone to sleep.  The man hung his head also, and might have been dozing from his appearance.  He was not asleep, however.  What mental machinery he had began to work more freely, and he actually did something that might be called thinking on the one subject that had lain as a dormant matter of curiosity in his head all day—­namely, how the girl would act when she woke to find the cart was actually gone and she left behind.  He had seen old Cameron die, and heard Bates promise to do his best for his daughter; he remembered her tears and pleading on the preceding day; the situation came to him now, as perceptions come to dull minds, with force that had gathered with the lapse of time.  He had not the refinement and acuteness of mind necessary to make him understand the disinterested element in Bates’s tyranny, and while he sympathised cunningly with the selfishness of which, in his mind, he accused Bates, it seemed to him that the promise to the dead was broken, and he thought upon such calamities as might befall in token of the dead man’s revenge.