And when Ollie knew by the sound and regular breathing on either side of him that both Tom and George were sound asleep, and he himself was about dozing off, he heard Buck mutter, in a self-accusing tone, “By gosh, I’m an unlucky guy; nothing like that ever happens to me.”
Then Ollie slept. It could not have been long thereafter that Buck Granger also drifted off into the land of sleep, to have this rest interrupted with vivid dreams of personal participation in all the incidents that his three friends had so modestly related to him.
What wakened Buck he could not tell, but he knew it was hours later and that the rain was still falling and that it was yet dark, although probably beyond the hour when, had it been clear, dawn would have been breaking. But it was not the mystery of what had wakened him that bothered Buck so much as it was that terrible feeling that possessed him—that unexplainable, indefinable feeling that we all have at times, when for some unknown reason we feel certain that something is wrong and we know not what, or why we feel it so keenly.
The four youths were billeted in the small section that remained standing of what once had been a cow-shed. Yes, here once had been a fertile farm, the home and the support of a thrifty Frenchman and his family. And now it was a vast shambles and ruin, with only a part of the cow-shed remaining as tragic testimony to its earlier estate. Not very luxurious quarters, you may think! But real luxury, after all, when compared to water-logged trenches and rain-soaked, rat-ridden dug-outs.
As Buck first came out of his sound sleep he was conscious only of the ceaseless, pitiless hammering of the rain upon the rusted tin roof of the shed within which he lay—conscious only of that and of the indefinable feeling, which he could not overcome, that something was wrong.
And there is nothing that so unpleasantly grips the mind and the imagination, and causes the heart occasionally to miss a beat, as that tense waiting, waiting, waiting which accompanies a premonition of impending evil or danger—born of no one knows what—which comes to one with sudden awakening in pitch darkness and amid strange surroundings.
So it was that even as Buck Granger lay there, fully aware now of where he was, and listening to the even breathing of his three friends who were stretched out not more than ten feet away from him, something happened which seemed almost to make the blood freeze in his veins.
It was a moan! Weak, subdued, but distinctly audible, it came from directly beneath him, as though out of the very ground upon which he lay.
Buck Granger was no coward, but there are some things which, calmly accepted if not easily accounted for in the assurance and self-possession which one feels in daylight, seem to verge upon the supernatural in the darkness and mystery of night.
The hand which Buck Granger passed swiftly across his now wide staring eyes was as cold as ice. For a moment he lay there as though hypnotized. And then the moan was repeated, this time so subdued as to be scarcely audible, but all the more uncanny for that very fact. With a quick movement that brought him to his hands and knees, Buck literally dived across the black space to where the other three men lay, landing directly beside Tom Walton.