Pretty soon the moon came up, and that made it seem chillier. It was as if the light was cold—it looked as if it was. I edged closer to the fire, where the blaze almost scorched my shins, and crouched there, with my heart beating thump, thump, and my insides feeling as if they were shriveling together for lack of anything to hold them out like they ought to be. I looked at my watch, hoping my turn on guard was over. Only a little more than a half-hour of it was gone!
The moon got higher, and the woods, instead of just being black as if a curtain was hanging all around me, got shadowy, and the shadows moved. Give me black darkness any time to the kind where there are patches of light and patches of shadows that keep shifting and oozing around; when the woods look that way you feel certain something is hiding and watching you in the places where the light isn’t.
I got the hatchet and put it between my knees, but it didn’t make me feel much better. I tried whittling, but I couldn’t keep my eyes on it; they wanted to wander around to see if anything was sneaking up on me. I thought about lots of things, and one of them was that if ever I got home it would take a lot of persuading to get me camping out at night again.
Another half an hour went by, and it seemed as if my hours would never pass. Nothing happened, but sometimes I wished it would. Being afraid something will happen is worse than the thing itself if it comes.
I guess it was about half-past ten when the funniest feeling came over me. It’s hard to tell just what it was, but more than anything else it felt as if somebody’s eyes were bearing on my back, watching and watching; and it felt as if the eyes were bright and as if they’d shine in the dark if I was to turn and look at them. I sat for more than five minutes before I could get up courage to look. When I did I couldn’t see a thing, but, all the same, I was as sure as anything that something had been looking at me.
About fifteen minutes later I heard a noise; it was just as if somebody had slipped on the hillside and scrambled for a minute before he could catch his feet. It might have been a stray sheep, or maybe a coon roaming around in the moonlight, but it didn’t sound like it to me; it sounded bigger and stronger. It was so very still afterward that I was more afraid than ever, because if it had been a sheep I’d have heard him running away, and even a coon would have made some sort of a racket. No, I says to myself, it’s something hiding and sneaking around with an eye on us; it’s the thing that used our pan and stole our potatoes and left that track in the sand.
That was all that happened during my watch, but I was glad when it came time to wake Mark to take my place. He came out rubbing his eyes and blinking at the light.
“Talk to me a minute,” he yawned, “till I git awake.”
We talked a spell, but I didn’t say anything about the noise or that I thought something had been watching me. When he was awake so he wouldn’t doze off again I went in and snuggled into my blanket. I was afraid at first I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, but before I really got to worrying about it I was gone; and I didn’t dream, either.
In the morning none of us had much to say about his watch during the night. By the looks of the others I’m sure they were just as afraid as I was, but they weren’t letting on and neither was I. Besides, it seemed sort of foolish with the sunlight shining bright through the trees and the water glittering and the birds chittering all around. The woods didn’t look as if there could be anything fearsome or dangerous in them; wild men seemed a long ways away and nothing to worry about, anyhow. What would a wild man be doing right outside of Wicksville? If there was one somebody would have seen it and talked about it before we got there.