s shaken intellect kept of the events of the night
relaxed, the disguised Lance, the story of his son, the murder, slipped
into nothingness; there remained only the one idea, his nightly watch
by the diamond pit. The instinct of long habit was stronger than the
darkness or the onset of the storm, and he kept his tottering way over
stream and fallen timber until he reached the spot. A sudden tremor
seemed to shake the lambent flame that had lured him on. He thought he
heard the sound of voices; there were signs of recent
disturbance,--footprints in the sawdust! With a cry of rage and
suspicion, Fairley slipped into the pit and sprang toward the nearest
opening. To his frenzied fancy it had been tampered with, his secret
discovered, the fruit of his long labors stolen from him that very
night. With superhuman strength he began to open the pit, scattering
the half-charred logs right and left, and giving vent to the
suffocating gases that rose from the now incandescent charcoal. At
times the fury of the gale would drive it back and hold it against the
sides of the pit, leaving the opening free; at times, following the
blind instinct of habit, the demented man would fall upon his face and
bury his nose and mouth in the wet bark and sawdust. At last, the
paroxysm past, he sank back again into his old apathetic attitude of
watching, the attitude he had so often kept beside his sylvan crucible.
In this attitude and in silence he waited for the dawn.

It came with a hush in the storm; it came with blue openings in the
broken up and tumbled heavens; it came with stars that glistened first,
and then paled, and at last sank drowning in those deep cerulean lakes;
it came with those cerulean lakes broadening into vaster seas, whose
shores expanded at last into one illimitable ocean, cerulean no more,
but flecked with crimson and opal dyes; it came with the lightly lifted
misty curtain of the day, torn and rent on crag and pine-top, but
always lifting, lifting. It came with the sparkle of emerald in the
grasses, and the flash of diamonds in every spray, with a whisper in
the awakening woods, and voices in the traveled roads and trails.

The sound of these voices stopped before the pit, and seemed to
interrogate the old man. He came, and, putting his finger on his lips,
made a sign of caution. When three or four men had descended he bade
them follow him, saying, weakly and disjointedly, but persistently: "My
boy--my son Robert--came h