geese who ride the
storm had meaning and relationship. The logic which he loved was
breaking to pieces in the hands of Randall Byrne.

Silence, after all, is only a name, never a fact. There are noises in
the most absolute quiet. If there is not even the sound of the cricket
or the wind, if there are not even ghost whispers in the house, there is
the sigh of one's own breathing, and in those moments of deadly waiting
the beat of the heart may be as loud and as awful as the rattle of the
death-march. Now, between the doctor and the cowpuncher, such a silence
began. Buck Daniels wanted nothing more in the world than to be out of
that room, but the eye of the doctor held him, unwilling. And there
began once more that eternal waiting, waiting, waiting, which was the
horror of the place, until the faint creakings through the windshaken
house took on the meaning of footsteps stalking down the hall and
pausing at the door, and there was the hushing breath of one who
listened and smiled to himself! Now the doctor became aware that the eye
of Buck Daniels was widening, brightening; it was as if the mind of the
big man were giving way in the strain. His face blanched. Even the lips
had no colour, and they moved, gibberingly.

"Listen!" he said.

"It is the wind," answered the doctor, but his voice was hardly audible.

"Listen!" commanded Daniels again.

The doctor could hear it then. It was a pulse of sound obscure as the
thudding of his heart. But it was a human sound and it made his throat
close up tightly, as if a hand were settling around his wind-pipe. Buck
Daniels rose from his chair; that half-mad, half-listening look was
still in his eyes--behind his eyes. Staring at him the doctor
understood, intimately, how men can throw their lives away gloriously in
battle, fighting for an idea; or how they can commit secret and foul
murder. Yet he was more afraid of that pulse of sound than of the face
of Buck Daniels. He, also, was rising from his chair, and when Daniels
stalked to the side door of the room and leaned there, the doctor
followed.

Then they could hear it clearly. There was a note of music in the voice;
it was a woman weeping in that room where the chain lay on the floor,
coiled loosely like a snake. Buck Daniels straightened and moved away
from the door. He began to laugh, guarding it so that not a whisper
could break outside the room, and his silent laughter was the most
horrible thing the doctor had ever se