e,
rolled in their blankets under the open sky, talking and discussing and
making plans. At last Cribbens rolled over on his side and slept. The
dentist could not sleep.

What! It was warning him again, that strange sixth sense, that obscure
brute instinct. It was aroused again and clamoring to be obeyed. Here,
in these desolate barren hills, twenty miles from the nearest human
being, it stirred and woke and rowelled him to be moving on. It had
goaded him to flight from the Big Dipper mine, and he had obeyed. But
now it was different; now he had suddenly become rich; he had lighted
on a treasure--a treasure far more valuable than the Big Dipper mine
itself. How was he to leave that? He could not move on now. He turned
about in his blankets. No, he would not move on. Perhaps it was his
fancy, after all. He saw nothing, heard nothing. The emptiness of
primeval desolation stretched from him leagues and leagues upon either
hand. The gigantic silence of the night lay close over everything, like
a muffling Titanic palm. Of what was he suspicious? In that treeless
waste an object could be seen at half a day's journey distant. In that
vast silence the click of a pebble was as audible as a pistol-shot. And
yet there was nothing, nothing.

The dentist settled himself in his blankets and tried to sleep. In five
minutes he was sitting up, staring into the blue-gray shimmer of the
moonlight, straining his ears, watching and listening intently. Nothing
was in sight. The browned and broken flanks of the Panamint hills lay
quiet and familiar under the moon. The burro moved its head with a
clinking of its bell; and McTeagues mule, dozing on three legs, changed
its weight to another foot, with a long breath. Everything fell silent
again.

"What is it?" muttered the dentist. "If I could only see something, hear
something."

He threw off the blankets, and, rising, climbed to the summit of the
nearest hill and looked back in the direction in which he and Cribbens
had travelled a fortnight before. For half an hour he waited, watching
and listening in vain. But as he returned to camp, and prepared to roll
his blankets about him, the strange impulse rose in him again abruptly,
never so strong, never so insistent. It seemed as though he were bitted
and ridden; as if some unseen hand were turning him toward the east;
some unseen heel spurring him to precipitate and instant flight.

Flight from what? "No," he muttered under his breath. "Go