wolf or bear, lying low in the wall, and only closed by a heavy curtain
of woollen.

This was an important discovery. The opening led directly into the
chamber of the outlaw. How easily it could be defended, the hunters
perceived at a glance. The inmate of the cavern, if wakeful and
courageous, standing above the gorge with a single hatchet, could brain
every assailant on the first appearance of his head. How serious, then,
the necessity of being able to know that the occupant of the chamber
slept--that occupant being Guy Rivers. The pursuers well knew what they
might expect at his hands, driven to his last fastness, with the spear
of the hunter at his throat. Did he sleep, then--the man who never
slept, according to the notion of his followers, or with one eye always
open!

He did sleep, and never more soundly than now, when safety required that
he should be most on the alert. But there is a limit to the endurance of
the most iron natures, and the outlaw had overpassed his bounds of
strength. He was exhausted by trying and prolonged excitements, and
completely broken down by physical efforts which would have destroyed
most other men outright. His subdued demeanor--his melancholy--were all
due to this condition of absolute exhaustion. He slept, not a refreshing
sleep, but one in which the excited spirit kept up its exercises, so as
totally to neutralize what nature designed as compensation in his
slumbers. His sleep was the drowse of incapacity, not the wholesome
respite of elastic faculties. It was actual physical imbecility, rather
than sleep; and, while the mere animal man, lay incapable, like a log,
the diseased imagination was at work, conjuring up its spectres as
wildly and as changingly, as the wizard of the magic-lanthorn evokes his
monsters against the wall.

His limbs writhed while he slept. His tongue was busy in audible speech.
He had no secrets, in that mysterious hour, from night, and silence, and
his dreary rocks. His dreams told him of no other auditors.

The hunter, who had found and raised the curtain that separated his
chamber from the gloomy gorges of the crag, paused, and motioned his
comrades back, while he listened. At first there was nothing but a deep
and painful breathing. The outlaw breathed with effort, and the sigh
became a groan, and he writhed upon the bed of moss which formed his
usual couch in the cavern. Had the spectator been able to see, the lamp
suspended from a ring in the roof