A guilty conscience is a proven coward-maker; so, too, is a quick, imaginative mind.  It took only a moment or two to convince Joe that this nocturnal interloper was not a creature of flesh and blood, but some enormous, unmentionable, creeping thing come out of the other world—­out of the cold earth—­to visit punishment upon him for his crime.  He could hear it stirring, finally, now here, now there; he could make out the rustle of its grave-clothes.  There is no doubt that the cabin was full of half-distinguishable sounds—­so is any warm habitation—­but to Joe’s panicky imagination the nature of these particular sounds indicated that they could not come from any normal, living being.  There was, for instance, a slow, asthmatic wheezing, like the breath of a sorely wounded man; a stretching and straining as of a body racked with mortal agony; even a faint bubbling choke like a death-rattle heard in an adjoining chamber.  These and others as horribly suggestive.  Joe’s wild agitation distorted all of them, no matter whether they came from his brother Frank, from the poorly seasoned pole rafters overhead, or from the sleepy dogs outside, and ’Poleon Doret, with a grim internal chuckle, took advantage of the fact.

When finally the elder McCaskey heard his own name whispered, the last shred of self-control left to him was whipped away; his wits went skittering, and for a second time he groped with frantic, twitching fingers for his revolver.  He raised it and, with a yell, fired at random into the blackness, meanwhile covering his eyes with his left arm for fear of beholding in the sulphurous flash that bloodless, fleshless menace, whatever it might be.

Somehow he managed to get out of bed and to place his back against the wall, and there he cowered until he heard his brother’s body threshing about the floor.  As a matter of fact, that shot had sent Frank sprawling from his bunk, and he was striving to kick off the hampering folds of his sleeping-bag, nothing more; but the thumping of his knees and elbows bore a dreadful significance to the terrified listener.  Evidently the Thing had closed in—­had grappled with Frank.  Its hands, damp with death sweat, even now were groping for him, Joe.  The thought was unbearable.

Blindly the elder brother thrust his revolver at full length in front of him and pulled the trigger; Frank shrieked, but again and again Joe fired, and when the last cartridge was spent he continued to snap the weapon.  He desisted only when he heard a voice, faint, but hoarse with agony, crying: 

“O God!  You’ve shot me, Joe!  You’ve shot me!”

Then and not until then, did a sort of sanity come to the wretch.  The revolver slipped from his fingers; he felt his bones dissolving into water; a horror ten times greater than he had previously suffered fell upon him.  He tried to speak, to throw off this hideous nightmare, but his voice came only as a dry, reedy whisper.

Frank was still now; he did not respond to his brother’s incoherencies except with a deep groaning that momentarily became more alarming.