gathering darkness, showed here and there in vague but incessant
motion; it could be nothing but an animal whose utterance was at once
so incoherent, monotonous, and unremitting. Yet, when the sound came
nearer, and the chaparral was parted, it seemed to be a man, and that
man Johnson.

Above the baying of phantasmal hounds that pressed him hard and drove
him on, with never rest or mercy; above the lashing of a spectral whip
that curled about his limbs, sang in his ears, and continually stung him
forward; above the outcries of the unclean shapes that thronged about
him,--he could still distinguish one real sound,--the rush and sweep of
hurrying waters. The Stanislaus River! A thousand feet below him drove
its yellowing current. Through all the vacillations of his unseated mind
he had clung to one idea,--to reach the river, to lave in it, to swim it
if need be, but to put it forever between him and the harrying shapes,
to drown forever in its turbid depths the thronging spectres, to wash
away in its yellow flood all stains and color of the past. And now he
was leaping from boulder to boulder, from blackened stump to stump,
from gnarled bush to bush, caught for a moment and withheld by clinging
vines, or plunging downward into dusty hollows, until, rolling,
dropping, sliding, and stumbling, he reached the river-bank, whereon
he fell, rose, staggered forward, and fell again with outstretched arms
upon a rock that breasted the swift current. And there he lay as dead.

A few stars came out hesitatingly above Deadwood Slope. A cold wind that
had sprung up with the going down of the sun fanned them into momentary
brightness, swept the heated flanks of the mountain, and ruffled the
river. Where the fallen man lay there was a sharp curve in the stream,
so that in the gathering shadows the rushing water seemed to leap out of
the darkness and to vanish again. Decayed drift-wood, trunks of trees,