od for his fire. Then, with a lighted cigar, and with his
boots steaming on the hearth, he sat in front of the blaze and fell into
deep study.

He was aching in every muscle when he finally stretched out on the bare
boards of the lower bunk. While he slept small furry noses appeared in
the openings in the broken floor, to be followed by little bodies that
moved cautiously out into the open. He roused once and peered over the
edge of the bunk. Several field mice were basking in front of the dying
embers of the fire, and two were sitting on his boots. He grinned at
them and lay back again, but he found himself fully awake and very
uncomfortable. He lay there, contemplating his own folly, and demanding
of himself almost fiercely what he had expected to get out of all this
effort and misery. For ten years or so men had come here. Wilkins had
come, for one, and there had been others. And had found nothing, and had
gone away. And now he was there, the end of the procession, to look for
God knows what.

He pulled the raincoat up around his shoulders, and lay back stiffly.
Then--he was not an imaginative man--he began to feel that eyes were
staring at him, furtive, hidden eyes, intently watching him.

Without moving he began to rake the cabin with his eyes, wall to wall,
corner to corner. He turned, cautiously, and glanced at the door into
the lean-to. It gaped, cavernous and empty. But the sense of being
watched persisted, and when he looked at the floor the field mice had
disappeared.

He began gradually to see more clearly as his eyes grew accustomed to
the semi-darkness, and he felt, too, that he could almost locate the
direction of the menace. For as a menace he found himself considering
it. It was the broken, windowless East wall, opposite the bunk.

After a time the thing became intolerable. He reached for his revolver,
and getting quickly out of the bunk, ran to the doorway and threw open
the door, to find himself peering into a blackness like a wall, and to
hear a hasty crunching of the underbrush that sounded like some animal
in full flight.

With the sounds, and his own movement, the terror died. The cold night
air on his face, the feel of the pine needles under his stockinged
feet, brought him back to sense and normality. Some creature of the
wilderness, a deer or a bear, perhaps, had been moving stealthily
outside the cabin, and it was sound he had heard, not a gaze he had
felt. He was rather cynically amuse