Elbert nodded attentively.
‘Remember what I say, when he starts tellin’ you about Red Ante!’ shouted Mr. Cotton, holding hard on his swerving team.
A while after that Elbert was alone on the steep canyon trail, his ears cracking like drying wallpaper from the altitude, and his heart windily at work. Springs saturated the earth from time to time. There positively didn’t seem to be any last water, until the trail widened in mid-afternoon and there faced him:
‘Are You Doomed?’
White Stone Flats. He found the two pines that had lived through the fire—all straight, but no Mr. Leadley to meet him. He called a little, but the raising of his voice left him queerly uneasy. There was food in his roll, and he finally spread his blankets and stretched out for the night. The idea struck him that he must soon get back to work, for it seemed like ten days already.
Mr. Leadley must have forgotten the date. Up here anything was possible. Hours after, a white glare through the eastern trees and a tardy, bulging moon showed up; then quite the most curdling wail sounded through the whitish night. It was ‘doggy’ in depth and volume, but the wauling of it was like a greatly enlarged cat. Now Elbert had an opportunity to study the stuff he was made of. He wasn’t encouraged. His heart was knocking to get out. Nothing short of a mountain lion made that noise.
There was another sound—hard to place, that welled out of the dragging hours—a queer hum, so soft that one didn’t know whether it was a mile away or in his hair. It was like a woman going insane, but not violently.
Hard to believe, but the sky began to show signs at last that another day was actually to be given to mankind. Elbert was making coffee in full daylight, when another outcry reached him—his first dawning suspicion as to the human quality of these tones. He stood up; his hand actually shook as he set down his tin cup, and his eye caught the black letters:
‘Are You Doomed?’
‘How did you know?’ he muttered—and right then, the call again—vaguely like his own name. A minute later he was running across the Flats, his ears verifying as he ran: