. Lucetta, shading her
eyes from the glow of the fire, saw two gleaming disks of light shining
in the blackness of the backgrounding forest. Her reason told her that
they were the eyes of the animal; that the unnerving apparition was
probably a deer halted and momentarily fascinated by the sight of the
fire. But the incident was none the less alarming to the town-bred young
woman.

Later there were softly padding footfalls, and these gave her a sharper
shock. She knew next to nothing about the fauna of the northern woods,
nor did she have the comforting knowledge that the largest of the
American cats, the panther, rarely attacks a human being unless wounded,
or under the cruelest stress of winter hunger. Breathlessly she listened
and watched, and presently she saw the eyes of the padding intruder
glowing like balls of lambent green fire. Whereupon it was all she could
do to keep from shrieking frantically and waking her companion.

After the terrifying green eyes had vanished it occurred to her to
wonder why they had seen and heard so little of the night prowlers at
their former camps. The reason was not far to seek. Days well filled
with toil and stirring excitement had been followed by nights when sleep
came quickly and was too sound to be disturbed by anything short of a
cataclysm.

As midnight drew near, Prime began to mutter disconnectedly. Lucetta
did not know whether he was talking in his sleep or whether he had
become delirious again, but at all events this new development
immeasurably increased the uncanny weirdness of the night-watch. Though
many of the vaporings were mere broken sentences without rhyme or
reason, enough of them were sufficiently clear to shadow forth a sketchy
story of Prime's life.

Lucetta listened because she could not well help it, being awake and
alert and near at hand. Part of the time Prime babbled of his boyhood on
the western New York farm, and she gathered that some of the bits were
curious survivals of doubtless long-forgotten talks with his
grandfather. Breaking abruptly with these earlier scenes, the wandering
underthought would skip to the mystery, charging it now to Watson Grider
and again calling it a blessed miracle. With another abrupt change the
babbler would be in Europe, living over again his trampings in the
Tyrol, which, it seemed, had been taken in the company of an older man,
a German, who was a Heidelberg professor.

Farther along, after an interval of silence