“The herder’s other dog,” he explained. “Knew there ought to be two. Better shooting this time.”
Hugh felt a little stir of excitement. The black dog had been slain by a small-calibered bullet, and his body was still warm. The Indian increased his pace.
A second more, and they were at the door of the tent. It was hard for them to see clearly at first. The shadows were quite deep inside. And at first they were only aware of a heavy, strange silence that seemed to grow and deepen as they stood looking.
The herder was not standing up to greet them. Neither was he busy at any of his late-evening tasks. They made out his figure dimly, sprawled on his blankets in one corner of the tent.
“By Jove!” Hugh exclaimed. “I believe the beggar’s asleep.”
But he didn’t speak quite the truth. In reality, he believed something far different. It is the way of a certain type of man to avoid at all costs any appearance or semblance of hysterics or sensationalism. Hugh was of that type, and he unconsciously shrank from the utterance of his true beliefs.
“Not asleep,” the Indian replied bluntly. He stopped, walked into the tent, and turned the man’s body in his hands. No wonder the camp fire was dying. Its tender—the sheep herder—had been shot and killed a few moments before.
CHAPTER V
Hugh Gaylord had never known a more mysterious hour than that in which the darkness fell over the sheep camp. At the end of it he felt as if he had lost himself in a dim and eerie dream and only the eternal reality of the sheep, bedding down and bleating in the falling shadows, made it credible to him. But the mystery did not lie in the qualities of the scene itself. Rather it was in his own attitude toward them: a feeling of familiarity and long acquaintance that he could not understand.
It all seemed so natural and real. Even the dim twilight and the glow of the dying fire seemed something vividly remembered from long ago. Yet there was nothing here of the world he knew, the world of cities and gaieties and throngs. There was nothing in his past life to explain the intimacy he felt. At the edge of the little meadow the dusk deepened between the trees. The strong profiles of the pines dimmed and blurred, the distant peaks receded—with a curious effect of actual motion—into the further recesses of the twilight. Here and there the stars were pushing through, and he suddenly regarded them with some wonder. He couldn’t ever remember noticing them in particular before. Perhaps the smoke that ever hung over his city mostly obscured them; possibly he had never had occasion to think about them. Now he was startled by the same curious sense of familiarity,—as if he had lain beneath them a thousand-thousand years and they were old friends come back to talk to him again.