“Make any fellow sleep,” he said to himself, as he raised his head; and he was in the act of passing his hand across his wet lips, when he became suddenly petrified, and stood there motionless, gazing straight before him at a hideous object, apparently not a yard away. It looked misty and dim in the semi-darkness, but plain enough for the boy to see apparently a huge head resting in a pair of hands, which held the chin and pressed up the long loose cheeks on either side, curving up the monstrous mouth into a ghastly grin. The forehead was low, and the eyebrows were shaggy, while from beneath them glared into his a great pair of glowing eyes, that flashed at times and sparkled in the starlight, which rained down on and through a bush of dark, tangled hair, a portion of which hung below the head on either side, and stood out wildly around.
There was no movement but in the eyes, and these literally held the boy, so that for a time he could do nothing but stare at the horrible-looking object, which seemed to come nearer to him—so near that it almost touched him; then receded, till it was almost invisible, and once more stood quite still.
But it was not moving, and Saxe still had sufficient command over self to know that this effect was produced by the mist from the fall being wafted between them by the soft night wind.
How long he stood bent forward there gazing at that horrible head Saxe did not know, but by degrees he began to shrink back slowly, getting farther and farther away, till he dared to turn and run with all his might to the tent door, and creep in, fully expecting that the monster was about to spring upon him till he was inside, when he fastened the canvas door with trembling fingers, and crept to his bed again, where he lay down quickly, with his breath sobbing and the perspiration standing in great drops upon his face. The sensation was upon him that the terrible being he had seen would begin breaking in through the canvas directly, and he lay there with one arm stretched out ready to wake up Dale for help at the first sound outside the tent.
As he now lay trembling there, he recalled Melchior’s words about the valley being bewitched, the falling stones, the disappearance of the crystals; and he was fast growing into a belief that the old legends must be true, and that there really existed a race of horrible little beings beneath the earth, whose duty it was to protect the treasures of the subterranean lands, and that this was one of them on the watch to take the crystals from their hands. But in the midst of the intense silence of the night better sense began to prevail.
“It’s all nonsense—all impossible,” he muttered. “There are no such things, and it was all fancy. I must have seen a block of stone through the falling water, and I was half asleep and nearly dreaming at the time. Why, if I were to wake Mr Dale and tell him, he would laugh at me. It was all a dream.”
But, all the same, he lay shivering there, the aspect of the face having startled him in a way that at times enforced belief; and it was getting rapidly on toward morning when he once more fell asleep, to dream of that hideous head and see the terrible eyes gazing right into his own.