Steep was the trail she took, and ever the silence seemed to deepen. She kept watch ahead for the flock, pale white in the moonlight. She found herself listening closely for any sound that might indicate their position, either the faint bleat of the ewes or the triumph cries of such beasts of prey that had killed from their numbers. But while she did not hear these things, the silence was full of other, lesser sounds. All the creatures of the forest were stirring in their night occupations, and so deep and unfathomable was the stillness that it seemed to her that she could discern their each little motion. Sometimes it was the distant tread of the deer in the buckbush. No rains had fallen since April; the brush was dead and dry as she had never before seen it, and even the stalking folk made a misstep occasionally. She heard the Little People stirring in the leaves; once a gopher, once a porcupine rattled his quills with a pretended fierceness a short distance off the trail, and once a lynx mewed like a domestic cat behind her. She hastened on. She turned into a little valley that she knew,—a place the mouth of which was obscured by brush and in which a wing of the flock might have been easily lost. And then she found the white band, bedded down for the night. There had been casualties earlier in the evening, but mostly the beasts of prey had not yet found them. She started to drive them the long three miles back to camp. Still the moonlight worked its conjurations in the forest; and she felt a growing discomfiture. At first she laid it to nerves. She had been tired after the day’s ride, and perhaps the long walk after the sheep had overtaxed her already exhausted body. The sense of oppression, of distant and unfamiliar peril in the forests about her grew ever more pronounced. She tried in vain to hurry the sheep. Never, it seemed to her, had they moved so slowly. The first mile took interminable ages, the second was too long for belief. No luxury, no achievement by which women usually gauge happiness could mean so much to her to-night as that little bright circle in the distant camp over which Hugh stood guard. She was on the last mile by now, and she kept straining to see the first gleam of the camp fire through the trees. Perhaps all her apprehension had been but fancy, after all. It was only a little way farther—scarcely a mile—and the adventure would soon be over. The forest was oddly hushed and breathless.