ut. You two take
this knoll here. If you see anything movin' that looks suspicious, blaze
away. We'll c-come a-runnin'."

Bob had drunk at supper two cups of strong coffee instead of his usual
one. His thought had been that the stimulant would tend to keep him awake
on duty. The effect the coffee had on him was to make his nerves jumpy.
He lay on the knoll, rifle clutched fast in his hands, acutely sensitive
to every sound, to every hazy shadow of the night. The very silence was
sinister. His imagination peopled the sage with Utes, creeping toward him
with a horrible and deadly patience. Chills tattooed up and down his
spine.

He pulled out the old silver watch he carried and looked at the time. It
lacked five minutes of ten o'clock. The watch must have stopped. He held
it to his ear and was surprised at the ticking. Was it possible that he
had been on sentry duty only twelve minutes? To his highly strung nerves
it had seemed like hours.

A twig snapped. His muscles jumped. He waited, gun ready for action, eyes
straining into the gloom. Something rustled and sped away swiftly. It
must have been a rabbit or perhaps a skunk. But for a moment his heart
had been in his throat.

Again he consulted the watch. Five minutes past ten! Impossible, yet
true. In that eternity of time only a few minutes had slipped away.

He resolved not to look at his watch again till after eleven. Meanwhile
he invented games to divert his mind from the numbing fear that filled
him. He counted the definite objects that stood out of the darkness--the
clumps of sage, the greasewood bushes, the cottonwood trees by the river.
It was his duty to patrol the distance between the knoll and those trees
at intervals. Each time he crept to the river with a thumping heart.
Those bushes--were they really willows or Indians waiting to slay him
when he got closer?

Fear is paralyzing. It pushes into the background all the moral
obligations. Half a dozen times the young ranger was on the point of
waking Dud to tell him that he could not stand it alone. He recalled
Blister's injunctions. But what was the use of throwing back his head and
telling himself he was made in the image of God when his fluttering
pulses screamed denial, when his heart pumped water instead of blood?

He stuck it out. How he never knew. But somehow he clamped his teeth and
went through. As he grew used to it, his imagination became less active
and tricky. There were moments, toward th