He started off again, going warily, and anon reached, without accident, the short arm of the wood, through which he groped cautiously until he came opposite to the back of the hut. Here he paused again, and throwing himself down, crawled on his hands and knees across the short strip of intervening ground. At the window he raised himself up cautiously and listened intently. Not a sound broke the stillness, and satisfied at last, he edged his way round to the front.
‘All cl’ar,’ he thought. ‘Thet’s well. Now I’ll set down jest inside the door, and then ef anybody comes I kin slip in and away through the window, or out across the open ez the case may be. It’s oncomfortably nigh the camp, this cabin; but I ’magine it’s the safest place till the mornin’ breaks.’
He sat down at the door of the cabin, and pulling out a piece of the corporal’s biscuit, ate it with relish. Half an hour passed, and the deep stillness acting soothingly upon his tired nerves, he began to feel drowsy, and actually nodded once or twice.
‘This won’t do,’ he muttered. ‘I must keep awake; it’——Another nod, and then he sprang noiselessly to his feet, wide awake and quivering in every limb. He heard, or thought he heard, a scratching sound at the window of the hut.
He strained his ears to listen, ready the instant that doubt became certainty to flee across the open into the fields once more.
Again that faint scratching sound, this time a little louder, and accompanied by a gentle tapping.
‘It’s a squirr’l, I reckon,’ thought Ephraim, much relieved. ‘He has maybe got a knot hole on the roof.’
‘Whippo-wil! whippo-wil! whippo-wil!’
Ephraim stiffened into attention again. There was nothing extraordinary about the sound. It was night, or rather very early morning, the time when the whip-poor-wills took their exercise and screamed out their loud, clear notes; but there was something else. In the old days at Staunton, which the startling events of the last four and twenty hours had crowded so far into the background that they seemed removed by a distance of years from the present, it had been Luce’s custom to come whip-poor-willing down the little back street where Ephraim lived, to give his friend timely notice of his approach. Therefore the sound had a greater significance for the Grizzly.
‘Hear thet bird!’ he said to himself. ‘It’s jest what Luce use ter do. My! I wonder will I ever git back to the old home again.’