The Spectator., 1915-10-19
CHAPTER W.

Physical exhaustion will finally tell. even over such handicaps as a noun tain feather bed and the fumes of backwoods cabin
 If Juanita Holland did not at last actually fall asleep, she drifted into sort of nightmare coma from which she awoke with a start.
 Finally she fell again into that half sleep which dreams of wakefulness It may have lasted minutes or hours, but suddenly she reused again with a start from a new nightmare and lay trembling under the oppression of a poignant foreboding. What was it that she had subconsciously heard or imag- ined? She was painfully wide awake in the slumbering cabin. At last she was sure of sound. low but instinct with warning.
 Beardog was growing just outside the door
 Then. violently and without the pref ace of gradual approach-precisely as though horsenSen had sprung from the earth-there clattered and beat past the front of the cabin a staccato thun- der of wildly galloping hoofs and a rattle of scattered rocks. She felt an uncanny freezing of her marrow Horses travel perilous and broken roads in that fashion only when their riders are in wild haste.
 As abruptly as the drumbeat had come it died again into silence, and there was no diminuendo of hoofbeats receding into distance. The thing was weird and ghostly. She had not no ticed in the weariness of her arrival at the cabin that the road ran deep in sand to the corner of the fence and that after fifty yards of rough and broken rock it fell away again into an other sound mutiling stretch. She knew only that she was thoroughly frightened. and that whatever the noise was, it proclaimed hot and des- perate haste.
 Yet even in her terror she had moved only to turn her head and had opened her eyes cautiously and mar rowly.
 There was no sound in the cabin now; not even the stertorous breath of a snore The fire flickered faintly and occasionally sent up from its white bed of ashes a dying spurt. before which the darkness fell back little for the moment.
 She could see that Fletch McNash had half risen in his bed. His head was partly turned in an attitude Of intent listening. and his pose was as rigid as that of a bird-dOg frozen on a point It had all been momentary. and as Juanita gazed she saw other fig. ures stir uneasily, though no one spoke. The missionary lay still, but the woman's figure moved restlessly beneath the heaped.up comforter.
 So. for a few moments, the strange and tense tableau held. and the girl, watching the householder's alert yet motionless pose, remembered him as he had hunched drunkenly over his plate a few hours ago. The two pic lures were hard to reconcile.
 Then. at some warning which her less acute ears failed to register, she saw Fletch McNashs right hand sweep outward toward the wall and come up gripping the rife.
 Still there was no word. but the cid est boys head had risen from the pallet.
 Keyed now to concert pitch, the girl held her body rigid, and through half closed lids looked across the dim room. While she was so staring and pretending to sleep, there drifted from long way off all insistent. animal like yell with a peculiar quaver in it's final note She did not know that it was the famous McBriar rallying cry, and that trouble inevitably followed