“Oh, Miss David,” cried Miss Tucker, “won’t you go out to my tent with me?  I feel so nervous to-night.”

“What is the matter?” asked the nurse suspiciously, looking from one to another of the flushed faces and noting the restless hands and the fearful eyes.

“Nothing, nothing at all, but my head aches and I feel lonesome.”

The nurse contracted her lips curiously.  “Of course I will go,” she said.

“Let me come too,” said Miss Landbury, rising with alacrity.  “I have a headache myself.”

Huddled together in an anxious group they set forth, and the nurse, like a good shepherd, led her little flock to shelter.  But as she walked back to her room, her brows were knitted curiously.

“What in the world were the silly things talking about?” she wondered.

“David Duke,” Carol was informing her husband, as she stood over him, in negligee ready to “hop in,” “I shall let the light burn all night, or I shall sleep in the cot with you.  I won’t run any risk of white shadows sitting on me in the dark.”

“Why, Carol—­”

“Take your pick, my boy,” she interrupted briskly.  “The light burns, or I sleep with you.”

“This cot is hardly big enough for one,” he argued.  “And neither of us can sleep with that bright light burning.”

“David,” she wailed, “I have looked under the bed three times already, but I know something will get me between the electric switch and the bed.”

David laughed at her, but said obligingly, “Well, jump in and cover up your head with a pillow, and get yourself settled, and I will turn off the lights myself.”

“It is a sin and a shame and I am a selfish little coward,” Carol condemned herself, but just the same she was glad to avail herself of the privilege.

A little later the white colony on the mesa was in darkness.  But Carol could not sleep.  The blankets over her head lent a semblance of protection, but most distracting visions came to her wide and burning eyes.

“Are you asleep, David?” she would call at frequent intervals, and David’s “Yes, sound asleep,” gave her momentary comfort.

But finally he was awakened from a light sleep by a soft pressure against his foot.  Even David started nervously, and “Ghosts” flashed into his logical and well-ordered brain.  But no, it was only the soft and shivering form of his wife, curling herself noiselessly into a ball on the foot of his cot.  David watched her, shaking with silent laughter.  Surreptitiously she slipped an arm beneath his feet, and circled them in a deadly grip.  If the ghosts got her, they would get David’s feet, and in her girlish mind ran a half acknowledged belief that the Lord wouldn’t let the ghosts get as good a man as David.

Wretchedly uncomfortable as to position, but blissfully assured in her mind, she fell into a doze, from which she was brought violently by a low whisper in the room: