that he could watch this trail, knowing that it would be a thoroughfare for all who happened to pass that way in the moonlight, and his good judgment had been rewarded.
Since midnight, when he had gone on watch, three glimpses of woods wild folk had been vouchsafed him. He had scarcely settled himself behind the log when a big buck with widely arching antlers walked slowly along the trail, leaped the dry bed of the little stream which before the summer drought had wound through the glade, and passed on without pause into the woods some twenty feet to windward of the watcher. An hour later a raccoon ambled by, taking the same course which the buck had followed; and not long before daylight the watcher suddenly realized that a doe had come from nowhere and was standing motionless in the glade, a shadowy, impalpable figure the outlines of which he could barely distinguish. Presently the doe vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared, and thenceforward the patient watcher saw no living thing, though now and again his ears told him that smaller wild folk, invisible in that faint light, were passing at intervals. With the approach of dawn even these infinitesimal noises ceased, and for half an hour or more the silence was absolute untill that first sharp, small, metallic voice for the morning punctured it with startling suddenness.
