Walking on as in a dream, the black, impenetrable barriers of skirting thickets opened and gave way to vague distances that it appeared impossible to reach, dim vistas that seemed unapproachable.

Gradually he seemed himself to become a part of the mysterious night.

He was becoming as pulseless, as calm, as passionless.
What was that?
A shot in the direction of the cabin! yet so faint, so echoless, so ineffective in the vast silence, that he would have thought it his fancy but for the strange instinctive jar upon his sensitive nerves.

Was it an accident, or was it an intentional signal to him?
He stopped; it was not repeated, the silence reasserted itself, but this time with an ominous death-like suggestion.

A sudden and terrible thought crossed his mind.