perimenter was rigid and listening again. So the
tiresome minutes and decades of minutes dragged away, until at last our
tense forms filmed over with a dulled consciousness, and we slept, if one
might call such a condition by so strong a name--for it was a sleep set
with a hair-trigger. It was a sleep seething and teeming with a weird
and distressful confusion of shreds and fag-ends of dreams--a sleep that
was a chaos. Presently, dreams and sleep and the sullen hush of the
night were startled by a ringing report, and cloven by such a long, wild,
agonizing shriek! Then we heard--ten steps from the stage--

"Help! help! help!" [It was our driver's voice.]

"Kill him! Kill him like a dog!"

"I'm being murdered! Will no man lend me a pistol?"

"Look out! head him off! head him off!"

[Two pistol shots; a confusion of voices and the trampling of many feet,
as if a crowd were closing and surging together around some object;
several heavy, dull blows, as with a club; a voice that said appealingly,
"Don't, gentlemen, please don't--I'm a dead man!" Then a fainter groan,
and another blow, and away sped the stage into the darkness, and left the
grisly mystery behind us.]

What a startle it was! Eight seconds would amply cover the time it
occupied--maybe even five would do it. We only had time to plunge at a
curtain and unbuckle and unbutton part of it in an awkward and hindering
flurry, when our whip cracked sharply overhead, and we went rumbling and
thundering away, down a mountain "grade."

We fed on that mystery the rest of the night--what was left of it, for it
was waning fast. It had to remain a present mystery, for all we could
get from the conductor in answer to our hails was something that sounded,
through the clatter of the wheels, like "Tell you in the morning!"

So we lit our pipes and opened the corner of a curtain for a chimney, and
lay there in the dark, listening to each other's story of how he first
felt and how many thousand Indians he first thought had hurled themselves
upon us, and what his remembrance of the subsequent sounds was, and the
order of their occurrence. And we theorized, too, but there was never a
theory that would account for our driver's voice being out there, nor yet
account for his Indian murderers talking such good English, if they were
Indians.

So we chatted and smoked the rest of the night comfortably away, our
boding anxiety being somehow marvelously dissipated by the r