any sign of movement.
Presently he heard his regular and quiet breathing, and putting his hand
again gently on the breast, felt the steady rise and fall beneath.

"Let me know if anything's wrong," he whispered, "or if I can do
anything. Wake me at once if you feel--queer."

He hardly knew what to say. He lay down again, thinking and wondering
what it all meant. Defago, of course, had been crying in his sleep. Some
dream or other had afflicted him. Yet never in his life would he forget
that pitiful sound of sobbing, and the feeling that the whole awful
wilderness of woods listened....

His own mind busied itself for a long time with the recent events, of
which _this_ took its mysterious place as one, and though his reason
successfully argued away all unwelcome suggestions, a sensation of
uneasiness remained, resisting ejection, very deep-seated--peculiar
beyond ordinary.

IV

But sleep, in the long run, proves greater than all emotions. His
thoughts soon wandered again; he lay there, warm as toast, exceedingly
weary; the night soothed and comforted, blunting the edges of memory and
alarm. Half an hour later he was oblivious of everything in the outer
world about him.

Yet sleep, in this case, was his great enemy, concealing all approaches,
smothering the warning of his nerves.

As, sometimes, in a nightmare events crowd upon each other's heels with
a conviction of dreadfulest reality, yet some inconsistent detail
accuses the whole display of incompleteness and disguise, so the events
that now followed, though they actually happened, persuaded the mind
somehow that the detail which could explain them had been overlooked in
the confusion, and that therefore they were but partly true, the rest
delusion. At the back of the sleeper's mind something remains awake,
ready to let slip the judgment. "All this is not _quite_ real; when you
wake up you'll understand."

And thus, in a way, it was with Simpson. The events, not wholly
inexplicable or incredible in themselves, yet remain for the man who saw
and heard them a sequence of separate facts of cold horror, because the
little piece that might have made the puzzle clear lay concealed or
overlooked.

So far as he can recall, it was a violent movement, running downwards
through the tent towards the door, that first woke him and made him
aware that his companion was sitting bolt upright beside him--quivering.
Hours must have passed, for it was the pale gleam o