"Yes. An', Snake, I tax you with this heah. Ain't any of them queer feelin's operatin' in you? ""No!" rolled out the leader, savagely. But his passionate denial was a proof that he lied. From the moment of this outburst, which was a fierce clinging to the old, brave instincts of his character, unless a sudden change marked the nature of his fortunes, he would rapidly deteriorate to the breaking-point. And in such brutal, unrestrained natures as his this breaking-point meant a desperate stand, a desperate forcing of events, a desperate accumulation of passions that stalked out to deal and to meet disaster and blood and death.
Wilson put a little wood on the fire and he munched a biscuit. No one asked him to cook. No one made any effort to do so. One by one each man went to the pack to get some bread and meat.
Then they waited as men who knew not what they waited for, yet hated and dreaded it.
Twilight in that glen was naturally a strange, veiled condition of the atmosphere. It was a merging of shade and light, which two seemed to make gray, creeping shadows.
Suddenly a snorting and stamping of the horses startled the men.
"Somethin' scared the hosses," said Anson, rising. "Come on."Moze accompanied him, and they disappeared in the gloom.
More trampling of hoofs was heard, then a cracking of brush, and the deep voices of men. At length the two outlaws returned, leading three of the horses, which they haltered in the open glen.
The camp-fire light showed Anson's face dark and serious.
"Jim, them hosses are wilder 'n deer," he said. "I ketched mine, an' Moze got two. But the rest worked away whenever we come close. Some varmint has scared them bad. We all gotta rustle out thar quick."Wilson rose, shaking his head doubtfully. And at that moment the quiet air split to a piercing, horrid neigh of a terrified horse. Prolonged to a screech, it broke and ended.
Then followed snorts of fright, pound and crack and thud of hoofs, and crash of brush; then a gathering thumping, crashing roar, split by piercing sounds.
"Stampede!" yelled Anson, and he ran to hold his own horse, which he had haltered right in camp. It was big and wild-looking, and now reared and plunged to break away.
Anson just got there in time, and then it took all his weight to pull the horse down. Not until the crashing, snorting, pounding melee had subsided and died away over the rim of the glen did Anson dare leave his frightened favorite.
"Gone! Our horses are gone! Did you hear 'em?" he exclaimed, blankly.
"Shore. They're a cut-up an' crippled bunch by now," replied Wilson.
"Boss, we'll never git 'ern back, not 'n a hundred years,"declared Moze.
"Thet settles us, Snake Anson," stridently added Shady Jones. "Them hosses are gone! You can kiss your hand to them. . . . They wasn't hobbled. They hed an orful scare.
They split on thet stampede an' they'll never git together.
. . . See what you've fetched us to!"
Under the force of this triple arraignment the outlaw leader dropped to his seat, staggered and silenced. In fact, silence fell upon all the men and likewise enfolded the glen.
Night set in jet-black, dismal, lonely, without a star.
Faintly the wind moaned. Weirdly the brook babbled through its strange chords to end in the sound that was hollow. It was never the same -- a rumble, as if faint, distant thunder -- a deep gurgle, as of water drawn into a vortex -- a rolling, as of a stone in swift current. The black cliff was invisible, yet seemed to have many weird faces; the giant pines loomed spectral; the shadows were thick, moving, changing. Flickering lights from the camp-fire circled the huge trunks and played fantastically over the brooding men.
This camp-fire did not burn or blaze cheerily; it had no glow, no sputter, no white heart, no red, living embers. One by one the outlaws, as if with common consent, tried their hands at ****** the fire burn aright. What little wood had been collected was old; it would burn up with false flare, only to die quickly.
After a while not one of the outlaws spoke or stirred. Not one smoked. Their gloomy eyes were fixed on the fire. Each one was concerned with his own thoughts, his own lonely soul unconsciously full of a doubt of the future. That brooding hour severed him from comrade.
At night nothing seemed the same as it was by day. With success and plenty, with full-blooded action past and more in store, these outlaws were as different from their present state as this black night was different from the bright day they waited for. Wilson, though he played a deep game of deceit for the sake of the helpless girl -- and thus did not have haunting and superstitious fears on her account -- was probably more conscious of impending catastrophe than any of them.
The evil they had done spoke in the voice of nature, out of the darkness, and was interpreted by each according to his hopes and fears. Fear was their predominating sense. For years they had lived with some species of fear -- of honest men or vengeance, of pursuit, of starvation, of lack of drink or gold, of blood and death, of stronger men, of luck, of chance, of fate, of mysterious nameless force. Wilson was the type of fearless spirit, but he endured the most gnawing and implacable fear of all -- that of himself -- that he must inevitably fall to deeds beneath his manhood.
So they hunched around the camp-fire, brooding because hope was at lowest ebb; listening because the weird, black silence, with its moan of wind and hollow laugh of brook, compelled them to hear; waiting for sleep, for the hours to pass, for whatever was to come.
And it was Anson who caught the first intimation of an impending doom.