leading, half dragging him toward the little cabin. When they had
reached it, Tommy placed him on a rude "bunk," or shelf, and stood for
a moment in anxious contemplation of the tremor-stricken man before him.
Then he said rapidly: "Listen, Uncle Ben. I'm goin' to town--to town,
you understand--for the doctor. You're not to get up or move on any
account until I return. Do you hear?" Johnson nodded violently. "I'll be
back in two hours." In another moment he was gone.

For an hour Johnson kept his word. Then he suddenly sat up, and began
to gaze fixedly at a corner of the cabin. From gazing at it he began to
smile, from smiling at it he began to talk, from talking at it he began
to scream, from screaming he passed to cursing and sobbing wildly. Then
he lay quiet again.

He was so still that to merely human eyes he might have seemed asleep
or dead. But a squirrel, that, emboldened by the stillness, had entered
from the roof, stopped short upon a beam above the bunk, for he saw that
the man's foot was slowly and cautiously moving toward the floor, and
that the man's eyes were as intent and watchful as his own. Presently,
still without a sound, both feet were upon the floor. And then the bunk
creaked, and the squirrel whisked into the eaves of the roof. When he
peered forth again, everything was quiet, and the man was gone.

An hour later two muleteers on the Placerville Road passed a man with
dishevelled hair, glaring, bloodshot eyes, and clothes torn with bramble
and stained with the red dust of the mountain. They pursued him, when
he turned fiercely on the foremost, wrested a pistol from his grasp, and
broke away. Later still, when the sun had dropped behind Payne's Ridge,
the underbrush on Deadwood Slope crackled with a stealthy but continuous
tread. It must have been an animal whose dimly outlined bulk, in the