Vose Adams’s voice was low, but in the tomb-like stillness a thunderclap could not have been more distinct. The hail, however, produced no response. The angered Vose drew his Winchester to a level, with his finger on the trigger, but when he ran his eye along the barrel, he failed to perceive any target. He lowered 291 the muzzle a few inches and peered over the top. Nothing was discernible.
“You’re there somewhere and I’ll find you!”
Instead of rising erect, the sentinel advanced in a crouching posture, so that his head was no higher than if he were on his hands and knees.
This clever strategy was thrown away. Within five seconds, he was at the side of Hercules, prepared and expecting to grapple with his enemy, who, to his exasperation, continued invisible. Vose did not require to have the matter explained to him, for he understood it. Upon being hailed, the intruder instead of throwing up his hands or starting to run, had also assumed a stooping position. It was as if he had quietly sunk below the surface of a sea of darkness through which he was wading, and swum with noiseless celerity to a point beyond reach.
Vose was angered but took his defeat philosophically.
“You was too smart for me that time; I never had it played finer on me, but I guess it’s just as well; you’ve learned that we’re on the lookout and you can’t sneak into camp without some risk of having a hole bored inter you.”
But Vose was not yet through with his nocturnal experiences. He held his seat for some fifteen or twenty minutes without seeing or hearing anything to cause the slightest misgiving. The horses still slept, 292 and even the uneasy Hercules appeared to have become composed and to have made up his mind to slumber until morning.
“I don’t b’leve there’ll be anything more to disturb me, onless some wild animal wants his supper–––”
The thought had hardly taken shape, when a shiver of affright ran through him, though the cause was so slight that it might have brought a smile, being nothing more than a pebble rolling down the ravine, up which the fugitives had passed the day before. The stone came slowly, loosening several similar obstructions, which joined with it, the rustling increasing and continuing until all reached the bottom and lay at rest a few feet from where he sat.
Nothing could have been easier than for this to occur in the natural course of things, since hundreds of such instances were taking place at every hour of the day and night, but in the tense state of the sentinel’s nerves, he was inclined to attribute it either to the Indian that had just visited camp and slunk away, or to one of his comrades trying to steal a march upon him.