. My best fish of a lifetime--I'll never get
hold of a trout like that again."

Sim Gage was experiencing at the moment mingled gratitude and
resentment, but nothing could quench his own hospitable impulses. "Aw,
come on up, Doc," said he, "won't you? We can figure out some way to
take care of you right at my place. You and me can sleep in the tent."

"So you live in the tent?" inquired Dr. Barnes.

"Why, of course. She stays in the house. And she's there all alone
this very minute."

"Hit the trail, men," said Dr. Barnes. "Go on back home, and stay
there, you damn sagebrushers!"

CHAPTER XII

LEFT ALONE

Mary Warren, alone in the little cabin, found herself in a new world
whose existence she had never dreamed--that subjective and subconscious
land which bridges the forgotten genesis of things to the usual and
busy world of the senses, in which we pass our daily lives. Indeed,
never before had she known what human life really is, how far out of
perspective, how selfish, how distorted. Now, alone in the darkness,
back in the chaos and the beginning, she saw for the first time how
small a thing is life and how ill it is for the most part lived. A fly
buzzed loudly on the window pane--a bold, bronzed, lustrous fly, no
doubt, she said to herself, pompous and full of himself--buzzed again
and again, until the drone of his wings blurred, grew confused, ceased.
She wondered if he had found a web.

The darkness oppressed her like a velvet pall. She strained her eyes,
trying in spite of all to pierce it, beat at it, picked at it, to get
it from around her head; and only paused at length, her face beaded,
because she knew that way madness lay.

Time was a thing now quite out of her comprehension. Night and day,
all the natural and accustomed divisions of time, were gone for her.
She felt at the hands of her little watch, but found her mind
confused--she could not remember whether it was the stem or the hinge
which meant noon or midnight.

A thousand new doubts and fears of her newly created world assailing
her, she felt rather than saw the flood of the sunlight when she
stepped to the door gropingly, and stood, stick in hand, looking out.
Yes, that was the sun. But it was hard to reason which way was north,
which way lay the east, which was her home.

Home? She had no home! These years, she had known no home but the
single room which she had occupied with Annie Squires. And now even
that was g