What!  It was warning him again, that strange sixth sense, that obscure brute instinct.  It was aroused again and clamoring to be obeyed.  Here, in these desolate barren hills, twenty miles from the nearest human being, it stirred and woke and rowelled him to be moving on.  It had goaded him to flight from the Big Dipper mine, and he had obeyed.  But now it was different; now he had suddenly become rich; he had lighted on a treasure—­a treasure far more valuable than the Big Dipper mine itself.  How was he to leave that?  He could not move on now.  He turned about in his blankets.  No, he would not move on.  Perhaps it was his fancy, after all.  He saw nothing, heard nothing.  The emptiness of primeval desolation stretched from him leagues and leagues upon either hand.  The gigantic silence of the night lay close over everything, like a muffling Titanic palm.  Of what was he suspicious?  In that treeless waste an object could be seen at half a day’s journey distant.  In that vast silence the click of a pebble was as audible as a pistol-shot.  And yet there was nothing, nothing.

The dentist settled himself in his blankets and tried to sleep.  In five minutes he was sitting up, staring into the blue-gray shimmer of the moonlight, straining his ears, watching and listening intently.  Nothing was in sight.  The browned and broken flanks of the Panamint hills lay quiet and familiar under the moon.  The burro moved its head with a clinking of its bell; and McTeagues mule, dozing on three legs, changed its weight to another foot, with a long breath.  Everything fell silent again.

“What is it?” muttered the dentist.  “If I could only see something, hear something.”

He threw off the blankets, and, rising, climbed to the summit of the nearest hill and looked back in the direction in which he and Cribbens had travelled a fortnight before.  For half an hour he waited, watching and listening in vain.  But as he returned to camp, and prepared to roll his blankets about him, the strange impulse rose in him again abruptly, never so strong, never so insistent.  It seemed as though he were bitted and ridden; as if some unseen hand were turning him toward the east; some unseen heel spurring him to precipitate and instant flight.

Flight from what?  “No,” he muttered under his breath.  “Go now and leave the claim, and leave a fortune!  What a fool I’d be, when I can’t see anything or hear anything.  To leave a fortune!  No, I won’t.  No, by God!” He drew Cribbens’s Winchester toward him and slipped a cartridge into the magazine.

“No,” he growled.  “Whatever happens, I’m going to stay.  If anybody comes—­” He depressed the lever of the rifle, and sent the cartridge clashing into the breech.