We saw plainly.  The moss and lichen—­for earth there was hardly any—­had been scratched up by paws.  An animal about the size of a large dog it must have been, to judge by the marks.  We stood and stared in a row.

“Close to my head,” repeated the girl, looking round at us.  Her face, I noticed, was very pale, and her lip seemed to quiver for an instant.  Then she gave a sudden gulp—­and burst into a flood of tears.

The whole thing had come about in the brief space of a few minutes, and with a curious sense of inevitableness, moreover, as though it had all been carefully planned from all time and nothing could have stopped it.  It had all been rehearsed before—­had actually happened before, as the strange feeling sometimes has it; it seemed like the opening movement in some ominous drama, and that I knew exactly what would happen next.  Something of great moment was impending.

For this sinister sensation of coming disaster made itself felt from the very beginning, and an atmosphere of gloom and dismay pervaded the entire Camp from that moment forward.

I drew Sangree to one side and moved away, while Maloney took the distressed girl into her tent, and his wife followed them, energetic and greatly flustered.

For thus, in undramatic fashion, it was that the terror I have spoken of first attempted the invasion of our Camp, and, trivial and unimportant though it seemed, every little detail of this opening scene is photographed upon my mind with merciless accuracy and precision.  It happened exactly as described.  This was exactly the language used.  I see it written before me in black and white.  I see, too, the faces of all concerned with the sudden ugly signature of alarm where before had been peace.  The terror had stretched out, so to speak, a first tentative feeler toward us and had touched the hearts of each with a horrid directness.  And from this moment the Camp changed.

Sangree in particular was visibly upset.  He could not bear to see the girl distressed, and to hear her actually cry was almost more than he could stand.  The feeling that he had no right to protect her hurt him keenly, and I could see that he was itching to do something to help, and liked him for it.  His expression said plainly that he would tear in a thousand pieces anything that dared to injure a hair of her head.

We lit our pipes and strolled over in silence to the men’s quarters, and it was his odd Canadian expression “Gee whiz!” that drew my attention to a further discovery.

“The brute’s been scratching round my tent too,” he cried, as he pointed to similar marks by the door and I stooped down to examine them.  We both stared in amazement for several minutes without speaking.

“Only I sleep like the dead,” he added, straightening up again, “and so heard nothing, I suppose.”