No, he would not move on. Perhaps it was his
fancy, after all. He saw nothing, heard nothing. The emptiness of
primeval desolation stretched from him leagues and leagues upon either
hand. The gigantic silence of the night lay close over everything, like
a muffling Titanic palm. Of what was he suspicious? In that treeless
waste an object could be seen at half a day's journey distant. In that
vast silence the click of a pebble was as audible as a pistol-shot. And
yet there was nothing, nothing.
The dentist settled himself in his blankets and tried to sleep. In five
minutes he was sitting up, staring into the blue-gray shimmer of the
moonlight, straining his ears, watching and listening intently. Nothing
was in sight. The browned and broken flanks of the Panamint hills lay
quiet and familiar under the moon. The burro moved its head with a
clinking of its bell; and McTeagues mule, dozing on three legs, changed
its weight to another foot, with a long breath. Everything fell silent
again.
"What is it?" muttered the dentist. "If I could only see something, hear
something."
He threw off the blankets, and, rising, climbed to the summit of the
nearest hill and looked back in the direction in which he and Cribbens
had travelled a fortnight before.
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