“I ain’t going to sleep,” he muttered under his mustache.  “I can’t sleep; I’ll watch.”  He rose a second time, clambered to the nearest hilltop and sat down, drawing the blanket around him, and laying the Winchester across his knees.  The hours passed.  The dentist sat on the hilltop a motionless, crouching figure, inky black against the pale blur of the sky.  By and by the edge of the eastern horizon began to grow blacker and more distinct in out-line.  The dawn was coming.  Once more McTeague felt the mysterious intuition of approaching danger; an unseen hand seemed reining his head eastward; a spur was in his flanks that seemed to urge him to hurry, hurry, hurry.  The influence grew stronger with every moment.  The dentist set his great jaws together and held his ground.

“No,” he growled between his set teeth.  “No, I’ll stay.”  He made a long circuit around the camp, even going as far as the first stake of the new claim, his Winchester cocked, his ears pricked, his eyes alert.  There was nothing; yet as plainly as though it were shouted at the very nape of his neck he felt an enemy.  It was not fear.  McTeague was not afraid.

“If I could only see something—­somebody,” he muttered, as he held the cocked rifle ready, “I—­I’d show him.”

He returned to camp.  Cribbens was snoring.  The burro had come down to the stream for its morning drink.  The mule was awake and browsing.  McTeague stood irresolutely by the cold ashes of the camp-fire, looking from side to side with all the suspicion and wariness of a tracked stag.  Stronger and stronger grew the strange impulse.  It seemed to him that on the next instant he must perforce wheel sharply eastward and rush away headlong in a clumsy, lumbering gallop.  He fought against it with all the ferocious obstinacy of his simple brute nature.

“Go, and leave the mine?  Go and leave a million dollars?  No, no, I won’t go.  No, I’ll stay.  Ah,” he exclaimed, under his breath, with a shake of his huge head, like an exasperated and harassed brute, “ah, show yourself, will you?” He brought the rifle to his shoulder and covered point after point along the range of hills to the west.  “Come on, show yourself.  Come on a little, all of you.  I ain’t afraid of you; but don’t skulk this way.  You ain’t going to drive me away from my mine.  I’m going to stay.”

An hour passed.  Then two.  The stars winked out, and the dawn whitened.  The air became warmer.  The whole east, clean of clouds, flamed opalescent from horizon to zenith, crimson at the base, where the earth blackened against it; at the top fading from pink to pale yellow, to green, to light blue, to the turquoise iridescence of the desert sky.  The long, thin shadows of the early hours drew backward like receding serpents, then suddenly the sun looked over the shoulder of the world, and it was day.