; and, feeling strengthened
and reassured, dismissed all these fanciful terrors from my mind, and lay
down to sleep with composure.

How long I may have slept it is impossible for me to guess; but I was
awakened at last by a sudden, blinding flash of light into my face. It
woke me like a blow. In an instant I was upon my knees. But the light had
gone as suddenly as it came. The darkness was intense. And, as it was
blowing great guns from the sea, and pouring with rain, the noises of the
storm effectually concealed all others.

It was, I dare say, half a minute before I regained my self-possession.
But for two circumstances, I should have thought I had been awakened by
some new and vivid form of nightmare. First, the flap of my tent, which I
had shut carefully when I retired, was now unfastened; and, second, I
could still perceive, with a sharpness that excluded any theory of
hallucination, the smell of hot metal and of burning oil. The conclusion
was obvious. I had been awakened by some one flashing a bull's-eye lantern
in my face. It had been but a flash, and away. He had seen my face, and
then gone. I asked myself the object of so strange a proceeding, and the
answer came pat. The man, whoever he was, had thought to recognize me, and
he had not. There was another question unresolved; and to this, I may say,
I feared to give an answer; if he had recognized me, what would he have
done?

My fears were immediately diverted from myself, for I saw that I had been
visited in a mistake; and I became persuaded that some dreadful danger
threatened the pavilion. It required some nerve to issue forth into the
black and intricate thicket which surrounded and overhung the den; but I
groped my way to the links, drenched with rain, beaten upon and deafened
by the gusts, and fearing at every step to lay my hand upon some lurking
adversary. The darkness was so complete that I might have been surrounded
by an army and yet none the wiser, and the uproar of the gale so loud that
my hearing was as useless as my sight.

For the rest of that night, which seemed interminably long, I patrolled
the vicinity of the pavilion, without seeing a living creature or hearing
any noise but the concert of the wind, the sea, and the rain. A light in
the upper story filtered through a cranny of the shutter, and kept me
company till the approach of dawn.

V

With the first peep of day, I retired from the open to my old lair among
the sand hills, th