He pulled the raincoat up around his shoulders, and lay back stiffly.
Then--he was not an imaginative man--he began to feel that eyes were
staring at him, furtive, hidden eyes, intently watching him.
Without moving he began to rake the cabin with his eyes, wall to wall,
corner to corner. He turned, cautiously, and glanced at the door into
the lean-to. It gaped, cavernous and empty. But the sense of being
watched persisted, and when he looked at the floor the field mice had
disappeared.
He began gradually to see more clearly as his eyes grew accustomed to
the semi-darkness, and he felt, too, that he could almost locate the
direction of the menace. For as a menace he found himself considering
it. It was the broken, windowless East wall, opposite the bunk.
After a time the thing became intolerable. He reached for his revolver,
and getting quickly out of the bunk, ran to the doorway and threw open
the door, to find himself peering into a blackness like a wall, and to
hear a hasty crunching of the underbrush that sounded like some animal
in full flight.
With the sounds, and his own movement, the terror died. The cold night
air on his face, the feel of the pine needles under his stockinged
feet, brought him back to sense and normality. Some creature of the
wilderness, a deer or a bear, perhaps, had been moving stealthily
outside the cabin, and it was sound he had heard, not a gaze he had
felt. He was rather cynically amused at himself. He went back into the
cabin, closed the door, and stooped to turn his boots over before the
fire.
It was while he was stooping that he heard a horse galloping off along
the trail.
He did not go to sleep again. Now and then he considered the possibility
of its having been his own animal, somehow freed of the rope and
frightened by the same thing that had frightened him. But when with the
first light he went outside, his horse, securely hobbled, was grazing on
the scant pasture not far away.
Before he cooked his breakfast he made a minute examination of the
ground beneath the East wall, but the earth was hard, and a broken
branch or two might have been caused by his horse. He had no skill in
woodcraft, and in the broad day his alarm seemed almost absurd. Some
free horse on the range had probably wandered into the vicinity of the
cabin, and had made off again on a trot. Nevertheless, he made up
his mind not to remain over another night, but to look about after
breakfast, and then to start down again.