and deepened, dying into purple shadows.
Across the plain zigzagged pools of a level stream, as if a giant had
spilled handfuls of quicksilver here and there.

Miles Morgan, riding, drank in all the mysterious, wild beauty, as a man
at ease; as open to each fair impression as if he were not riding each
moment into deeper danger, as if his every sense were not on guard. On
through the shining moonlight and in the shadow of the hills he rode,
and, where he might, through the trees, and stopped to listen often, to
stare at the hill-tops, to question a heap of stones or a bush.

At last, when his leg-weary horse was beginning to stumble a bit, he
saw, as he came around a turn, Massacre Mountain's dark head rising in
front of him, only half a mile away. The spring trickled its low song,
as musical, as limpidly pure as if it had never run scarlet. The
picketed horse fell to browsing and Miles sighed restfully as he laid
his head on his saddle and fell instantly to sleep with the light of the
moon on his damp, fair hair. But he did not sleep long. Suddenly with a
start he awoke, and sat up sharply, and listened. He heard the horse
still munching grass near him, and made out the shadow of its bulk
against the sky; he heard the stream, softly falling and calling to the
waters where it was going. That was all. Strain his hearing as he might
he could hear nothing else in the still night. Yet there was something.
It might not be sound or sight, but there was a presence, a
something--he could not explain. He was alert in every nerve. Suddenly
the words of the hymn he had been singing in the afternoon flashed again
into his mind, and, with his cocked revolver in his hand, alone, on
guard, in the midnight of the savage wilderness, the words came that
were not even a whisper:

God shall charge His angel legions
Watch and ward o'er thee to keep;
Though thou walk through hostile regions,
Though in desert wilds thou sleep.

He gave a contented sigh and lay down. What was there to worry about? It
was just his case for which the hymn was written. "Desert wilds"--that
surely meant Massacre Mountain, and why should he not sleep here
quietly, and let the angels keep their watch and ward? He closed his
eyes with a smile. But sleep did not come, and soon his eyes were open
again, staring into blackness, thinking, thinking.

It was Sunday when he started out on this mission, and he fell to
remembering the Sunday nights a