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 days 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 amused at himself.  He went back into the cabin, closed the door, and stooped to turn his boots over before the fire.

It was while he was stooping that he heard a horse galloping off along the trail.

He did not go to sleep again.  Now and then he considered the possibility of its having been his own animal, somehow freed of the rope and frightened by the same thing that had frightened him.  But when with the first light he went outside, his horse, securely hobbled, was grazing on the scant pasture not far away.