For many minutes after that there was absolute silence.

Was it the cry of an animal that he had heard--or of a man?
In either case the creature who made it had fallen in the thicket and was lying there as still as if dead.

For a quarter of an hour Nathaniel waited and listened.

He could no longer have seen the movement of bushes in the gathering night-gloom of the forest but his ears were strained to catch the slightest sound from the direction of the mysterious thing that lay within less than a dozen rods of him.

Slowly he drew himself out from the shelter of the roots and advanced step by step.