So Charlie, crossing alone a forty-mile stretch of Lonesome Prairie, was as sure of his course as if bright day had shown him the Sweet Grass in the north, the blue summit of the Bear Paws on the eastern sky line, and the dark broken line to the south, where Marias Valley cut the plains. He rode at a jog trot, bearing south, always south, toward a ranch he knew, although the cloud rack in the sky darkened the plains, so that the outstretched fingers of a hand were scarcely visible. He had fifteen miles yet to go, if he had not miscalculated. Nowhere in the stretch he had covered was there any great difference in elevation. It was all flat, with scarcely perceptible hollows bearing away to the east, toward Lonesome Prairie Lake. But he approached now a terrain of less monotony, and he began to peer ahead for a well-known beacon, something akin to that which guided the Israelites on an historical occasion, a pillar of fire by night. Scarcely exact to call it a pillar. It was no more than a flickering gleam--an uncanny momentary glow. It came from an exposed surface seam of lignite coal, mysteriously set on fire long ago and burning still in the bowels of the earth. In the dark, flame and ignited gas would regularly flare about the pit, a ghostly incandescence, flashing intermittently above the smoldering embers of the burning seam. He marked it, at last, well ahead and a little to the right. He let the reins dangle loosely. The black horse he bestrode had been bred and broken in the Marias Valley. He would bear straight south, now, at a steady, smooth trot. “I expect,” he muttered to the beast’s dim ears, “you know we’re headed for the TL, like the feller who went home when there was no place else to go, eh, Crepe? You wouldn’t, bein’ a one-ideaed animal, think of headin’ back for the Seventy-seven round-up. Well, go to it, old boy.” Out of the dark a strange whispering sound arose. At first, Charlie took it to be the wind springing up again. Yet his ears no more than caught the sound, than he knew it was no wind rustling across the prairie. He pulled up. It sounded plainer, then--not so far ahead of him; it was unaccountable, mysterious, beyond identification. The curious fancy came to Charlie that it was like a giant snake crawling on its belly over the stiff dry grass. And that bit of imagery made him smile. Pythons in the jungle night! And the largest reptile in Montana was a four-foot rattlesnake. But that whispering sound stirred his curiosity to a great pitch. He had not the remotest idea what caused it, and he was familiar with every legitimate noise a man might expect to hear anywhere on the plains after nightfall--the rush of wind, the sound of running water, the thunder of hoofs, insect voices, the tumult of a herd, or the tiniest stirring. And, as he sat his horse, wondering what it could possibly be, the sound died away to nothing.