. That morning
there had been the half human imprint of a bear's foot in the ooze
beside the mill-wheel; and coming home with his scant stock from the
woodland pasture, he had found a golden squirrel--a beautiful, airy
embodiment of the brown woods itself--calmly seated on his bar-counter,
with a biscuit between its baby hands. He was full of his
characteristic reveries and abstractions that afternoon; falling into
them even at his wood-pile, leaning on his axe--so still that an
emerald-throated lizard, who had slid upon the log, went to sleep under
the forgotten stroke.

But at nightfall the wind arose,--at first as a distant murmur along
the hillside, that died away before it reached the rocky ledge; then it
rocked the tops of the tall redwoods behind the mill, but left the mill
and the dried leaves that lay in the river-bed undisturbed. Then the
murmur was prolonged, until it became the continuous trouble of some
far-off sea, and at last the wind possessed the ledge itself; driving
the smoke down the stumpy chimney of the mill, rattling the sun-warped
shingles on the roof, stirring the inside rafters with cool breaths,
and singing over the rough projections of the outside eaves. At nine
o'clock he rolled himself up in his blankets before the fire, as was
his wont, and fell asleep.

It was past midnight when he was awakened by the familiar clatter of
boulders down the grade, the usual simulation of a wild rush from
without that encompassed the whole mill, even to that heavy impact
against the door, which he had heard once before. In this he
recognized merely the ordinary phenomena of his experience, and only
turned over to sleep again. But this time the door rudely fell in upon
him, and a figure strode over his prostrate body, with a gun leveled at
his head.

He sprang sideways for his own weapon, which stood by the hearth. In
another second that action would have been his last, and the solitude
of Seth Collinson might have remained henceforward unbroken by any
mortal. But the gun of the first figure was knocked sharply upward by
a second man, and the one and only shot fired that night sped
harmlessly to the roof. With the report he felt his arms gripped
tightly behind him; through the smoke he saw dimly that the room was
filled with masked and armed men, and in another moment he was pinioned
and thrust into his empty armchair. At a signal three of the men left
the room, and he could hear them exploring th