ion of horror and consternation as an actor playing Macbeth
would have given a good deal to imitate. His eyes glared, his
breast heaved, his hands clenched....

"Why did you come here?" cried Foster, in a wail that seemed to
come from the bottom of his soul. "Why do you come here to torment
me with such a sight? Oh, God! It's horrible! It's horrible!... It
is your father I see!... He died fearfully! He died fearfully! He
was in Texas--on a horse--with cattle. He was alone. It is the
prairies! Alone! The horse fell! He was under it! His thigh was
broken--horribly broken! The horse ran away and left him! He lay
there stunned! Then he came to his senses! Oh! his thigh was
dreadful! Such agony! My God! Such agony!"

Foster fairly screamed at this. The younger of the men ... broke
into violent sobs. His companion wept, too, and the pair of them
clasped hands. Bartlett looked on concerned. As for me, I was
astounded.

"He was four days dying--four days dying--of starvation and
thirst," Foster went on, as if deciphering some terrible
hieroglyphs written on the air. "His thigh swelled to the size of
his body. Clouds of flies settled on him--flies and vermin--and he
chewed his own arm and drank his own blood. He died mad. And my
God! he crawled three miles in those four days! Man! Man! that's
how your father died!"

So saying, with a great sob, Foster dropped into his chair, his
cheeks purple, and tears running down them in rivers. The younger
man ... burst into a wild cry of grief and sank upon the neck of
his friend. He, too, was sobbing as if his own heart would break.
Bartlett stood over Foster wiping his forehead with a
handkerchief....

"It's true," said the younger man's friend; "his father was a
stock-raiser in Texas, and after he had been missing from his
drove for over a week, they found him dead and swollen with his
leg broken. They tracked him a good distance from where he must
have fallen. But nobody ever heard till now how he died." ...

Now it is hardly to be supposed that the young visitor could ever have had
this scene in his mind as vividly as Foster had. In that case where and
how did Foster get the vividness and emotion? How do we get them in
dreams? He dreamed while he was awake.

As Bartlett quotes this, and as it declares him to have been present, he
of course attests