But now at last there was a sound to vibrate against the empty silence in his ears, a little sound which at first he could not analyse and could not locate. He could hardly be sure whether his senses had tricked him or if he actually heard it. It seemed rather that he had _felt_ it. His body grew very tense as he tried to know where it was, what it was. But again the silence was heavier and more oppressive than before. At last, through the void of the absolute stillness, it came again. Now he knew what it was although not even yet could he be certain whence it came. It was a cautious step ... it might have been a man's step or a woman's. No muscle of his rigid body moved save alone the muscles which turned his eyes to right and left. At first he thought that there was some one moving toward him from behind, some one who had perhaps just come in through the gate or had been hidden in the straggling shrubbery. And the next instant he knew that the sounds were in front of him, that what he heard was some one walking in the house, tiptoeing cautiously, and yet not silently because the old boards of the floor whined and creaked under the slow tread. Had the night been less still, had his ears been less ready for any sound the faint creak-creak would not have reached him. "Woman or man?" was his problem. "Winifred Waverly or Henry Pollard?" There came a second sound and this he recognized; the scraping of dry wood against dry wood, the moving of the bars which the countryside knew that Henry Pollard used as the nightlock upon his doors. Thornton drew back a little, step by step, slowly, silently, and stopped under the pear trees. Now he was ten feet from the first of the front steps, ten feet from the board walk. When a man must trust everything to his ears for guidance his ears may tell him much. Thornton knew when the bars were down and when the door was opening very slowly. And then, suddenly, he knew that there was a third person out here in the garden close to him, and that this person ... man or woman? ... was moving with as great a slow caution as himself and the other some one in the house. There was the crack of a twig snapping underfoot ... silence ... slow cautious steps again. The cowboy moved again, a bare two steps now, and stopped, his back against the trunk of the largest of the pear trees, his eyes running back and forth between the door he could not see and the moving some one he could not see at the corner of the house. His widened nostrils had stiffened, as though he would scent out these beings, and his eyes were the alert eyes of an animal in the forest seeking its enemy through the denseness of a black undergrowth.