The athletic one rises and stretches till his joints crack. "Been asleep, have you? So have I. There's no opiate in the world like a day's tramping in the altitudes. Freshen you up any?"
"As to body, yes. But I've had a curious dream—if it were a dream." Silence while the sob of the river rises and falls on the night wind, and then a half-hesitant query. "Jeffard, do you believe in presentiments?"
The bearded one is on his knees before the fire, pressing a live coal into the bowl of his pipe, and the answer is delayed.
"I don't know whether I do or not; I have never had one."
"But you have known of others having them, haven't you?"
"Of one other: but in that instance it was foreknowledge rather than a foreboding. The presentiment should have been mine; and I had none."
"Would you mind telling me about it?"
"No. It was while I was making the survey for a logging railway in Quebec. I expected to be out all summer, but in the middle of it the company called a halt and I went home. I hadn't wired or written, but when I reached Hinsdale my father was at the station to meet me. For three days my mother had been insisting that I would come, and to quiet her they had been meeting the trains. She died the next evening."
"And you had no premonition?"
"None whatever. For a month or more I had been beyond the reach of the mails; and I had left her in her usual health. It was a bolt out of a clear sky."