gun.

She was preparing herself for a nervous break-down, and she knew it.
First came a fluttering of the eyeballs, so that she was compelled to
close her eyes for relief. A little later the eyelids were afflicted by
a nervous twitching that she could not control. To add to the strain,
she could not forget the tragedy. She remained as close to the horror as
on the first morning when the unexpected stalked into the cabin and took
possession. In her daily ministrations upon the prisoner she was forced
to grit her teeth and steel herself, body and spirit.

Hans was affected differently. He became obsessed by the idea that it
was his duty to kill Dennin; and whenever he waited upon the bound man or
watched by him, Edith was troubled by the fear that Hans would add
another red entry to the cabin's record. Always he cursed Dennin
savagely and handled him roughly. Hans tried to conceal his homicidal
mania, and he would say to his wife: "By and by you will want me to kill
him, and then I will not kill him. It would make me sick." But more
than once, stealing into the room, when it was her watch off, she would
catch the two men glaring ferociously at each other, wild animals the
pair of them, in Hans's face the lust to kill, in Dennin's the fierceness
and savagery of the cornered rat. "Hans!" she would cry, "wake up!" and
he would come to a recollection of himself, startled and shamefaced and
unrepentant.

So Hans became another factor in the problem the unexpected had given
Edith Nelson to solve. At first it had been merely a question of right
conduct in dealing with Dennin, and right conduct, as she conceived it,
lay in keeping him a prisoner until he could be turned over for trial
before a proper tribunal. But now entered Hans, and she saw that his
sanity and his salvation were involved. Nor was she long in discovering
that her own strength and endurance had become part of the problem. She
was breaking down under the strain. Her left arm had developed
involuntary jerkings and twitchings. She spilled her food from her
spoon, and could place no reliance in her afflicted arm. She judged it
to be a form of St. Vitus's dance, and she feared the extent to which its
ravages might go. What if she broke down? And the vision she had of the
possible future, when the cabin might contain only Dennin and Hans, was
an added horror.

After the third day, Dennin had begun to talk. His first question had
been, "What a