tes passed. He went steadily forward. Then abruptly he paused, his
head in the air, eye and ear alert. To that strange sixth sense of his,
responsive as the leaves of the sensitive plant, had suddenly come the
impression of a human being near at hand. He had neither seen nor
heard, but for all that he stopped an instant in his tracks; then, the
sensation confirmed, went on again with slow steps, advancing warily.

At last, his swiftly roving eyes lighted upon an object, just darker
than the grey-brown of the night-ridden land. It was at some distance
from the roadside. Vanamee approached it cautiously, leaving the road,
treading carefully upon the moist clods of earth underfoot. Twenty paces
distant, he halted.

Annixter was there, seated upon a round, white rock, his back towards
him. He was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his
hands. He did not move. Silent, motionless, he gazed out upon the flat,
sombre land.

It was the night wherein the master of Quien Sabe wrought out his
salvation, struggling with Self from dusk to dawn. At the moment when
Vanamee came upon him, the turmoil within him had only begun. The
heart of the man had not yet wakened. The night was young, the dawn far
distant, and all around him the fields of upturned clods lay bare and
brown, empty of all life, unbroken by a single green shoot.

For a moment, the life-circles of these two men, of so widely differing
characters, touched each other, there in the silence of the night under
the stars. Then silently Vanamee withdrew, going on his way, wondering
at the trouble that, like himself, drove this hardheaded man of affairs,
untroubled by dreams, out into the night to brood over an empty land.

Then speedily he forgot all else. The material world drew off from him.
Reality dwindled to a point and vanished like the vanishing of a star
at moonrise. Earthly things dissolved and disappeared, as a strange,
unnamed essence flowed in upon him. A new atmosphere for him pervaded
his surroundings. He entered the world of the Vision, of the Legend, of
the Miracle, where all things were possible. He stood at the gate of the
Mission garden.

Above him rose the ancient tower of the Mission church. Through the
arches at its summit, where swung the Spanish queen's bells, he saw the
slow-burning stars. The silent bats, with flickering wings, threw their
dancing shadows on the pallid surface of the venerable facade.

Not the faintest chirring