result is the combat's cause. Despite his struggles--despite his
strength and activity, which seemed wasted in a void, he felt the
cold fingers close upon his throat. Borne backward to the earth, he
saw above him the dead and drawn face within a hand's breadth of his
own, and then all was black. A sound as of the beating of distant
drums--a murmur of swarming voices, a sharp, far cry signing all to
silence, and Halpin Frayser dreamed that he was dead.

IV

A warm, clear night had been followed by a morning of drenching fog.
At about the middle of the afternoon of the preceding day a little
whiff of light vapor--a mere thickening of the atmosphere, the ghost
of a cloud--had been observed clinging to the western side of Mount
St. Helena, away up along the barren altitudes near the summit. It
was so thin, so diaphanous, so like a fancy made visible, that one
would have said: "Look quickly! in a moment it will be gone."

In a moment it was visibly larger and denser. While with one edge it
clung to the mountain, with the other it reached farther and farther
out into the air above the lower slopes. At the same time it
extended itself to north and south, joining small patches of mist
that appeared to come out of the mountainside on exactly the same
level, with an intelligent design to be absorbed. And so it grew and
grew until the summit was shut out of view from the valley, and over
the valley itself was an ever-extending canopy, opaque and gray. At
Calistoga, which lies near the head of the valley and the foot of the
mountain, there were a starless night and a sunless morning. The
fog, sinking into the valley, had reached southward, swallowing up
ranch after ranch, until it had blotted out the town of St. Helena,