ly distracted with the momentous present.

The two prisoners could no longer see each other, and the little
gestures and significant glances which had supplemented their few words,
and made up for the lack of better conversational facilities were
impracticable in the darkness.

The silent obscurity was strangely lonely. MacVintie began to doubt if
the other still lived.

"Attusah!" he said at length.

"_Tsida-wei-yu!_" (I am a great ada-wehi) murmured the ghost
mechanically.

He was quite spent, exhausted by the effort to logically exist as a
ghost in a world which had repudiated him as a live man.

MacVintie, who found it hard enough to reconcile himself to die once,
felt a poignant sympathy for him, who must needs die again. But the
Highlander could not think. He could not even pray. He desisted from the
fitful effort after a time. He had a depressing realization that a good
soldier relies upon the proficiency acquired by the daily drill to serve
in an emergency, not a special effort at smartness for an occasion. The
battle or the review would show the quality of the stuff that was in
him.

Despite the stunned despair which possessed his mental faculties, his
physical senses were keenly acute. He marked unconsciously the details
of the rising of the wind bringing the storm hitherward. A searching
flash of lightning showed the figure of the sentinel, half crouching
before the blast, at his post in the open portal. The rain was presently
falling heavily, and ever and anon a great suffusion of yellow glare in
its midst revealed the myriads of slanting lines as it came. He inhaled
the freshened fragrance it brought from the forests. He noted the
repeated crash of the thunder, the far-away rote of the echoes, the
rhythmic beat of the torrents on the ground, and their tumultuous swift
dash down the slope of the dome-shaped roof, and suddenly among these
turmoils,--he could hardly believe his ears,--a mild little whimper of
protest.

The sentinel heard it too. MacVintie saw his dark figure in the doorway
as he turned his head to listen. A woman's voice sounded immediately,
bidding a child beware how he cried, lest she call the great white owl,
the Oo-koo-ne-kah, to catch him!

The flare of the lightning revealed a pappoose the next moment, upright
in his perpendicular cradle, as it swung on his mother's back, in the
drenching downpour of the rain, for the woman had advanced to the
sentinel and was talking loudly