It irradiated Baintree’s wary bright eyes fixed abruptly upon it, as he sat in the corner. So sudden was its flare that he had not an instant to prepare for it, and a whisking feather in his hand still mechanically moved to and fro as he oiled a pistol, now and then dipping the tip of the quill into a tin vessel that stood on the jagged edge of the jamb beside him. He gazed with alert anxiety at the sleeping man upon the floor. The room was fully revealed in the melancholy red suffusion; Rathburn’s face was distinct with its far-away, unconscious expression. He did not stir; he saw naught of what he might have thought strange enough in the dead hour of the midnight,—Jake Baintree slipping cartridge after cartridge into the six chambers of Dr. Rathburn’s neglected revolver, not loaded before since he had come to the mountains in August. XXI. The storm wrought great havoc in the aspect of the outer world. The dull light of the autumn days that ensued served to show how the red and gold of the leaves had faded, and what resources of brown and a sere tawny gray the ultimate stages of decay held in store. They were thickly massed on the ground now, and most of the boughs were bare and wintry, and swayed, black with moisture, against the clouds, that in their silent shifting illustrated an infinite gradation of neutral tints between pearl and purple. Yet they seemed still, these clouds, so imperceptibly did each evolution develop from the previous presentments of vapor. Far away the gray mountains appeared akin to the dun cloud-masses they touched, as if range and peak were piled one above the other almost to the zenith. Certain fascinating outlines of the distance, familiars of the fair weather, were withdrawn beneath this lowering sky, and strangely enough the landscape seemed still complete and real without them, as if they had been merely some fine illusions of hope, some figment of a poetic mood, painted in tender tints upon an inconstant horizon. Close at hand the heights loomed grim and darkly definite. In dropping the mask of foliage they showed fierce features hitherto concealed,—gaunt crags and chasms, and awful beetling steeps; ravines, deeply cleft in the heart of the range; torrents, flung headlong down the precipices to be lost in the river; many sterile, bare rocky slopes.