"But how do these bones come there?" I said.
"It's the rats," he replied, "them mountain rats always pile away the
bones o' everything they eat--make a reg'lar cache o' them; what for I
dunno; but they do; that's all."
I stood then looking about the place, thinking of the end of that
"number three," all the horror of his last hours in my mind; and as I
was thus employed, with absent mien, suddenly Canlan laid his hand on my
arm.
"What you lookin' that queer, strained ways for?" he whispered, putting
his face within an inch of mine, so that I stepped back from the near
presence of him. "That was a mighty queer look in your eyes right now.
Say; do you know what you would make? You'd make an easy mark for me to
mesmerise. You 'd make a fine medium, you would."
I looked at him more shrewdly now, thinking he was assuredly losing his
last hold on reason; but he flung back a step from me.
"O! You think me mad?" he cried, and verily he looked mad then. "Eh?
Not me. You don't think I can mesmerise you? I've mesmerised
heaps--men too, let alone women," and he grinned in a very disgusting
fashion. "Say! If we could only see a jack-rabbit from the door o'
this shack, I 'd let you see what I could do. I 'd give you an example
o' my powers. I can bring a jack-rabbit to me, supposin' he's lopin'
along a hillside and sees me. I jest looks at him and _wills_ him to
stop--and he stops. And then I wills him to come to me--and he comes.
Mind once I was tellin' the boys at the Molly Magee about bein' able to
do it and they put up the bets I could n't--thought I was jest bluffin'
'em, and I went right out o' the bunkhouse a little ways and fetched a
chipmunk clean off a rock where he was settin' lookin' at us,--there
were n't no jack-rabbits there,--fetched him right into my hand. And
then a queer, mad feelin' come over me--I can't just tell you about
it--I don't just exactly understand it myself. I closes my hand on that
chipmunk and jest crushed him dead atween my fingers. And suthin'
seemed kind o' relieved here then, in the front o' my head, right here.
The boys never forgot that. They kind o' lay away off from me after
that--did n't like it. Yes, I could mesmerise you."
He waved his hands suddenly before my eyes.
"Feel any peculiar sensation at that?" he said.
"Yes," said I.
"What like?" he asked.
"I feel that I 'll not let you do it again," said I.
"Scared like? Feel kind o' slippin' away?"
"No," I said quietly: "not scared one little bit. But I object to your
waving your hands within an inch of my face. Any man of grit would n't
allow it."
"Well, well, say no more. We 'd better be investigating this yere
shack. God! If there was only a drink on the premises. I tell you
_they 're_ comin' on again, and when they come on I 'm fearsome--I am."
He looked round the place again and then cried out in a voice of agony:
"Look here! I don't want to lose holt o' myself yet; perhaps a little
bit of grub now might help me. I reckon I might be able to shove some
down my neck as a dooty. You go and make up the fire outside, do."
He spoke this in a beseeching whine. To see the way the creature
changed and veered about in his manner was interesting.
"We ain't goin' to sleep in here to-night, anyways, not for Jo, wi' them
mountain rats comin' in on us. It'll take quite a while o' huntin' to
get all their holes filled up. You go and make dinner. I could do a
flapjack and a slice o' bacon, I think, with a bit o' a struggle and
some resolution like."
Anything that might prevent me having a madman on my hands in that
wilderness was not to be ignored, so I went out and ran down the slope
to where the bushes climbed, and gathered fuel, a great armful, and so
came back again and made up a fire.
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.