The tension once more relieved, Rucker tumbled into the blankets again, calling himself shop names and swearing by all the gods of the metalworkers that nothing short of a forest-fire or an earthquake should make him lose any more sleep. Yet, while he was still only eye-deep in his first doze a new alarm brought him leaping to his feet and sent him, blinking and breathing hard, to the square of moonlight framed by the small window. What he heard this time sounded like the measured hoof-beats of a horse. Rucker had a pocket flash-light, and he turned it upon the face of his watch. He had gone early to bed, and it was still early, barely ten o’clock. A by-road, the one by which the drilling plant had been brought in, ran through the wood a little distance to the left of the glade. Staring wide-eyed, Rucker made out the shadowy bulk of a wheeled vehicle standing in this road, with a white horse, seemingly of incredible size, looming gigantic between the thills. The mechanician got his breath, and his heart began to pump in steadier rhythm. A horse and buggy betokened the presence of humankind, and Rucker was not a coward of men. Moreover, the ball-peen machinist’s hammer, lying within easy reach, was no mean weapon of defense in the grasp of a man who knew how to swing it. Obsessed by the idea that he might shortly have to resort to the hammer, the mechanician was wholly unprepared for what followed. Slowly, and as if they were materializing out of the shadows of the wood, two figures glided into the watcher’s field of vision: a man, tall, stately, wearing the long coat and the wide-brimmed soft hat which even an unobservant Rucker knew to be the garmentings of the old-fashioned Southern gentleman. And, hanging on the man’s arm, a woman, small and trimly clad. They came only to the edge of the open glade. The woman’s hat left her face in shadow, so that even if the light had been better, Rucker could not have seen what she looked like. The man’s back was turned to him, and here, again, he was at fault. Nevertheless, he was presently able to postulate the man’s gestures as those of anger, and to understand that the woman was pleading with him. It was etched out wholly in pantomime; Rucker could hear nothing. Twice or thrice the man made an inclusive motion with his free hand as if indicating the glade as the subject of whatever he was saying; and finally he balled his hand into a fist and shook it wrathfully at the unoffending drill derrick. This went on for some moments, the woman, Rucker fancied, trying to end it and draw the man away. Whether as the result of her efforts, or for some other reason, the scene ended as abruptly as it had begun. The two figures turned and faded into the wood shadows as mysteriously as they had come out of them; and while Rucker was still straining his eyes to keep them in sight, the horse and buggy vanished to a soft thudding of hoofs on the sandy road.