Long, clouds spread in the western sky, and to the east silver mists lay on the purple gloom of the .
Finally, when the great moon climbed the heavens and cast its ghastly radiance upon the bushes, it made a new and more brilliant of the campfire, where the flames merrily through its mesquit branches, filling the silence with the fire chorus, an ancient melody which surely bears a message of the inconsequence of individual tragedy—a message that is in the boom of the sea, the of the wind through the grass-blades, the silken clash of .
No figures moved in the space of the camp, and the search of the moonbeams failed to disclose a living thing in the bushes. There was no owl-faced clock to chant the weariness of the long silence that brooded upon the plain.
The dew gave the darkness under the mesquit a quality that made air seem nearer to water, and no eye could have seen through it the black things that moved like monster toward the camp. The branches, the leaves, that are fain to cry out when death approaches in the wilds, were by these uncanny bodies with the of the escaping serpent. They crept forward to the last point where assuredly no attempt of the fire could discover them, and there they paused to locate the . A romance relates the tale of the black cell hidden deep in the earth, where, upon entering, one sees only the little eyes of snakes fixing him in menaces. If a man could have approached a certain spot in the bushes, he would not have found it romantically necessary to have his hair rise. There would have been a sufficient expression of horror in the feeling of the death-hand at the nape of his neck and in his rubber knee-joints.
Two of these bodies finally moved toward each other until for each there grew out of the darkness a face smiling with tender dreams of . "The fool is asleep by the fire, God be praised!" The lips of the other widened in a grin of affectionate of the fool and his . There was some signaling in the gloom, and then began a series of subtle rustlings, interjected often with pauses, during which no sound arose but the sound of faint breathing.
A bush stood l............