“Now you can talk to me from your bunk an’ I’ll talk to you from mine,” she said in a sleepy, lazy voice.

Except for a prodigious yawn which came from the Girl there was an ominous quiet hanging over the place that chilled the man.  Sudden sounds startled him, and he found it impossible to make any progress with his preparations for the night.  He was about to make some remark, however, when to his well-attuned ears there came the sound of approaching footsteps.  In an instant he was standing in the parting made by the curtains, his face eager, animated, tense.

“What’s that?” he whispered.

“That’s snow slidin’,” the Girl informed him without the slightest trace of anxiety in her voice.

“God bless you, Girl,” he murmured, and retreated back of the curtains.  It was only an instant before he was back again with:  “Why, there is something out there—­sounded like people calling,” he again whispered.

“That’s only the wind,” she said, adding as she drew her robe tightly about her:  “Gettin’ cold, ain’t it?”

But, notwithstanding her assurances, Johnson did not feel secure, and it was with many misgivings that he now directed his footsteps towards the bed behind the curtains.

“Good-night!” he said uneasily.

“Good-night!” unconsciously returned the Girl in the same tone.

Taking off her slippers the Girl now put on a pair of moccasins and quietly went over to her bed, where she knelt down and made a silent prayer.

“Good-night!” presently came from a little voice in the rug.

“Good-night!” answered the man now settled in the centre of the much-befrilled bed.

There was a silence; then the little voice in the rug called out: 

“Say, what’s your name?”

“Dick,” whispered the man behind the curtains.

“So long, Dick!” drowsily.

“So long, Girl!” dreamily.

There was a brief silence; then, of a sudden, the Girl bolted upright in bed, and asked: 

“Say, Dick, are you sure you don’t know that Nina Micheltorena?”

“Sure,” prevaricated the man, not without some compunction.

Whereupon the Girl fell back on her pillows and called out contentedly a final “Good-night!”

XIII.

There was no mistaking then—­no need to contrast her feeling of anxiety of a few moments ago lest some other woman had preceded her in his affections, with her indifference on former occasions when her admirers had proved faithless, to make the Girl realise that she was experiencing love and was dominated by a passion for this man.

So that, with no reason whatever in her mind to question the sincerity of Johnson’s love for her, it would seem as if nothing were wanting to make the Girl perfectly happy; that there could be no room in her heart for any feeling other than elation.  And yet, curiously enough, the Girl could not doze off to sleep.  Some mysterious force—­a vague foreboding of something about to happen—­impelled her to open her eyes again and again.