“I tell you what, Master Bart.”
No answer.
“I say, young one, are you asleep?”
No reply.
“Well, he has dropped off sudden,” growled Joses. “I suppose I must tell him what another time.”
Having made up his mind to this, the sturdy fellow gave himself a bit of a twist in his blanket, laid his head upon his arm, and in a few seconds was as fast asleep as Bart.
The latter slept soundly all but once in the night, when it seemed to him that he had heard a strange, wild cry, and, starting up on his elbow, he listened attentively for some moments, but the cry was not repeated, and feeling that it must have been in his dreams that he had heard the sound, he lay down again and slept till dawn, when he sprang up, left every one asleep, and stole off, rifle in hand, to see if he could get a shot at a deer anywhere about the mountain, and also to have a look down into the tremendous canyon about whose depths and whose rushing stream he seemed to have been dreaming all the night.
He recollected well enough the way they had gone on the previous evening, and as he stepped swiftly forward, there, at the bottom of the narrow rift between the mass of fallen rock and the mountain, was the pale lemon-tinted horizon, with a few streaks above it flecking the early morning sky and telling of the coming day.
“The canyon will look glorious when the sun is up,” said Bart to himself; “but I don’t see any game about, and—oh!—”
Click—click—click—click went the locks of his double rifle as he came suddenly upon a sight which seemed to freeze his blood, forcing him to stand still and gaze wildly upon what was before him.