and
crack and thud of hoofs, and crash of brush; then a gathering thumping,
crashing roar, split by piercing sounds.

"Stampede!" yelled Anson, and he ran to hold his own horse, which he had
haltered right in camp. It was big and wild-looking, and now reared and
plunged to break away. Anson just got there in time, and then it took
all his weight to pull the horse down. Not until the crashing, snorting,
pounding melee had subsided and died away over the rim of the glen did
Anson dare leave his frightened favorite.

"Gone! Our horses are gone! Did you hear 'em?" he exclaimed, blankly.

"Shore. They're a cut-up an' crippled bunch by now," replied Wilson.

"Boss, we'll never git 'ern back, not 'n a hundred years," declared
Moze.

"Thet settles us, Snake Anson," stridently added Shady Jones. "Them
hosses are gone! You can kiss your hand to them.... They wasn't hobbled.
They hed an orful scare. They split on thet stampede an' they'll never
git together. ... See what you've fetched us to!"

Under the force of this triple arraignment the outlaw leader dropped to
his seat, staggered and silenced. In fact, silence fell upon all the men
and likewise enfolded the glen.

Night set in jet-black, dismal, lonely, without a star. Faintly the wind
moaned. Weirdly the brook babbled through its strange chords to end in
the sound that was hollow. It was never the same--a rumble, as if faint,
distant thunder--a deep gurgle, as of water drawn into a vortex--a
rolling, as of a stone in swift current. The black cliff was invisible,
yet seemed to have many weird faces; the giant pines loomed spectral;
the shadows were thick, moving, changing. Flickering lights from the
camp-fire circled the huge trunks and played fantastically over the
brooding men. This camp-fire did not burn or blaze cheerily; it had no
glow, no sputter, no white heart, no red, living embers. One by one the
outlaws, as if with common consent, tried their hands at making the fire
burn aright. What little wood had been collected was old; it would burn
up with false flare, only to die quickly.

After a while not one of the outlaws spoke or stirred. Not one smoked.
Their gloomy eyes were fixed on the fire. Each one was concerned with
his own thoughts, his own lonely soul unconsciously full of a doubt of
the future. That brooding hour severed him from comrade.

At night nothing seemed the same as it was by day. With success and
plenty, with full-blooded action past and mo