Water was not so easy to find, but a muddy and boggy part of the hill led me to a spring, and I set to work on preparing food. With all this coming and going I must have been busied quite half an hour before even getting the length of mixing the dough. Canlan, by that time, had got the windlass out and had lugged it across to the covered shaft beside the spur of outcropping rock that ran down parallel with the ridge in the lee of which I had lit the fire. He went back to the cabin and carried out the coil of rope, and had just got that length in his employ when I called him over for our meal; our evening meal it was, for, intent on our labours, we had not noticed how the sun was departing. All the vasty world of hollows below us was brimmed with darkness. All the peaks and the mountain ridges marching one upon the other into the shadowing east were lit, toward us, with the last light when Canlan sat down to force himself to eat. But I saw he had difficulty in swallowing. The jerking of face and hands, I also perceived, was increasing past ignoring. So too, presently became the fixed stare of his eye upon us as he sat with his hand frozen on a sudden half-way to his mouth. "Listen! Don’t you hear nuthin’?" he asked, hoarse and low. "Nothing," said I. "Ah! It’s jest them fancies," said he, and fell silent. Then again, with a strange, nervous twitch and truly awful eyes, he said in a whisper, "Say, tell me true? Did n’t you hear suthin’ right now?" "I heard a coyote howl," I said. "No, no; but somebody whispering?" he said. "Two or three people all huddling close somewhere and tellin’ things about me. By gum! I won’t have it! I dursent have it!" he said in a low scream—which is the best description of his voice then that I can give you. I shuddered. He was a terrible companion to have here on this bleak, windy hillside, with the thin trees below us marching down in serried ranks to the thicker forest below, and the scarped peaks showing against the pale moon that hung in the sky awaiting the sun’s going. I shook my head. "Sure?" he asked. "Positive," said I. He bent toward me and said in a small voice, "Keep your eye on me now. I ain’t goin’ to ask you another time, for I think when I speak they stop a-whispering; but I’ll jest twitch up my thumb like this—see?—fer a signal to you when I hear ’em." He sat hushed again; and then suddenly his eyes started and he raised his thumb, turning a face to me that glittered pale like lead. "Now?" he gasped. "Nothing," I said: "not a sound." "Ah, but I spoke there," he said. "I ought n’t to have spoken; that scared ’em; and they quit the whispering when they hear me." He sat again quiet, his head on the side, listening, and I watching his hand, thinking it best to humour him and to try to convince him out of this lunacy.