pack and hang it over R.M.'s neck and shoulder. "I got no use for it," he was saying. "Yer friend might jest as well hev it." He knew, therefore, quite well that I was watching. But R.M. knew nothing, less than nothing. He neither stirred nor woke. A more kindly, tender-hearted fellow than Morris the Stiff, no traveller in wild places could possibly desire.
It was perhaps a couple of hours later when I woke again, disturbed this time not by noise, but by the sudden absence of it. One winter's night the inhabitants of Niagara, similarly, woke up because, ice having formed, the thunder of the falls had ceased. I listened a moment, then went out. The rain had ceased, the clouds were gone, in a clear sky the three-quarter moon shone brightly. The rain-washed air seemed perfumed beyond belief. Nor did the old moon merely "look round her when the heavens were bare," she sprawled fantastically at full length, as it were, in her magnificent blue-black bed of naked space. I went out to a clear spot among the trees. Far away rose a soft murmur. The air hummed and shook with the roar of distant rapids, so calm and still the night was. No bird, no animal cried. The earth herself, it seemed, stopped turning in that wonderful stillness. Those few minutes painted a picture that memory must always keep. . . .
Three months later the first week in October found us in New York again. The bullets were forgotten and, of course, unmentioned, and five months of glorious wasted time lay safely behind us.
