e went round the
trunk to the farther side and gazed up into the overhanging gloom.
Still, nothing! He examined the ground all about with the minutest care.
Whatever had lurked there a minute before had left small trace of its
presence yet slight though the traces were, he detected them. _Something
had been there._

He remained where he was for a long time. He preferred to be the eyes
under the tree rather than allow the tree to get eyes again so that it
might keep watch on _him_!

He was so very still that a couple of wood-mice went running over his
moccasins, and a little black-and-white woodpecker ran up and down the
trunk, searching for insects almost within reach of his hand. But these
things belonged to the ordinary happenings of the forest. There was
neither sight nor sound which gave him any reason to think that the
thing which had watched under the hemlock was still lurking in the
neighbourhood.

After a while he felt he could not stay any longer in the gloom. As he
stepped out into the warm current of air, he had a sense of intense
relief. Yet he did not wish to continue his watch from the camp, because
of its nearness to the hemlock, lest there should steal back into its
blind gloom the eyes that made it see.

So he climbed through the scrub up the mountain-side till he came out
upon a grassy slope, two hundred feet above the camp.

He was above the tops of the sombre spruce woods now. The slanting
sunbeams touched their summits into bronze and ruddy gold. Yet always,
beneath the gold,--as Dusty Star well knew--lay the heavy green silence
that never stirred even at noon, where the furtive feet padded softly
over the brown fir-needles, and the furtive eyes glimmered in the gloom.

In the valley beneath nothing moved. From a thousand miles of forest and
mountain the silence seemed to be oozing into it, filling it to the
brim. And at his back, rose Carboona. From all its gorges, precipices
and barrens there came not a single sound. The vast world of the
afternoon seemed heavily asleep. Worn out with all his watching, Dusty
Star also slept.

When he awoke, the last ray of sunlight had left the eastern peaks. At
his feet the camp lay in deep shadow.

Ah, why did not the Spirit of the Wild Places come to him now, and tell
him not to go down? At various times already during the life the Spirit
had warned him, he didn't know how. There had been no distinct shape,
nor any sound. But the same mysterious warni