The men looked up. “Don’t know, Mr. Carhart,” replied the more talkative one. “I ain’t seen ’em.” Carhart turned away, and again his eyes roved about over the beaten ground. Very slowly and thoughtfully he began walking around the deserted wagons in widening circles. Those of the men who were back from the river watched him curiously. After a time he stopped and looked at some tracks in the sand, and then, still walking slowly, followed them off to the right. A few of the men, the more observant ones, fell in behind him, but he did not glance around. The foremost laborer stopped a moment and waited for the man next behind. “The boss is done up,” he said in a low voice. The other man nodded. “Unsteady in the legs,” he replied. “And he’s gone white. I see it when we was at the river.” The tracks were distinct enough, but Carhart did not quicken his pace. He was talking to himself, half aloud: “It’ll go on until it’s settled,--those things have to, out here. He’s a coward, but he’ll drink it down every day until the idea gets to running loose in his head.”--He staggered a little, then pulled himself up short. “What’s the matter with me, anyway!” he muttered. “This is a pretty spectacle!” And he walked deliberately on. The trail led him, and the quiet little file of men behind him, over and around a low ridge and a chain of knolls. “This heat keeps a dead rein on you,” he said, again speaking half aloud. “Let’s see, what was I thinking,--oh, the boys at the camp, they needed water too; I was going to load up and hurry back to help them out.” And then, as he walked on with a solemn precision not unlike that of a drunken man, the scene shifted, and another scene--one which had long ago slipped out of his waking thoughts,--took its place. He was fishing a trout stream in the Adirondacks. He had found a series of pools in a narrow gorge where the brook came leaping merrily down from one low ledge to another. The underbrush on the steep banks was dark and impenetrable. The pine and hemlock and beech and maple and chestnut trees grew thick on either hand, and so matted their branches overhead that only a little checkered light could sift through. The rocks were dark with moss; the stream was choked at certain points with the debris of the last flood. He was tired after the day’s fishing. A storm came up. It grew very black and ugly in that little ravine. And then, for no reason, a thing happened which had not happened in his steady mind before or since. He fell into a curious horror, in which the tangled wilderness and the gloom and the rushing rain and the creaking trees and the noise of the falling water and that of the thunder all played some part. He recalled that he had found a hollow in the bank, where a large tree had been uprooted, and had taken shivering refuge there. The wilderness had always before seemed man’s playground. It suddenly became a savage living and breathing thing to which a man was nothing.