Chapter 30

Joe McCaskey was not a coward, neither was he a superstitious man, but he had imagination. The steady strain of his and Frank's long flight, the certainty of pursuit close behind, had frayed his nerve and rendered him jumpy. For a man in his condition to be awakened out of a trancelike sleep by an intruder at once invisible, dumb; to feel the presence of that mysterious visitor and actually to see him--it--bulked dim and formless among the darting shadows cast by a blazing match--was a test indeed. It was too much for Joe.

As for Frank, he had actually seen nothing, heard nothing except his brother's voice, and then--that sigh. For that very reason his terror was, if anything, even greater than his brother's.

During what seemed an age there was no sound except the stertorous breathing of the McCaskeys themselves and the stir of the dogs outside. The pale square of the single window, over which a bleached-out cotton flour-sack had been tacked, let in only enough light to intensify the gloom. Within the cabin was a blackness thick, tangible, oppressive; the brothers stared into it with bulging eyes and listened with ear-drums strained to the point of rupture. Oddly enough, this utter silence augmented their agitation. Unable finally to smother the evidence of his steadily growing fright, Frank uttered a half-audible moan. Joe in the next bunk put it down as a new and threatening phenomenon. What sort of thing was it that sighed and moaned thus? As evidence of the direction Joe's mind was taking, he wondered if these sounds could be the complaint of Courteau's unshriven spirit. It was a shocking thought, but involuntarily he gasped the dead man's name.

A guilty conscience is a proven coward-maker; so, too, is a quick, imaginative mind. It took only a moment or two to convince Joe that this nocturnal interloper was not a creature of flesh and blood, but some enormous, unmentionable, creeping thing come out of the other world--out of the cold earth--to visit punishment upon him for his crime. He could hear it stirring, finally, now here, now there; he could make out the rustle of its grave- clothes. There is no doubt that the cabin was full of half- distinguishable sounds--so is any warm habitation--but to Joe's panicky imagination the nature of these particular sounds indicated that they could not come from any normal, living being. There was, for instance, a slow, asthmatic wheezing, like the breath of a sorely wounded man; a stretching and straining as of a body racked with mortal agony; even a faint bubbling choke like a death-rattle heard in an adjoining chamber. These and others as horribly suggestive. Joe's wild agitation distorted all of them, no matter whether they came from his brother Frank, from the poorly seasoned pole rafters overhead, or from the sleepy dogs outside, and 'Poleon Doret, with a grim internal chuckle, took advantage of the fact.

When finally the elder McCaskey heard his own name