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Choking down an urgent dread that I had of touching the thing which reached through the window to kill the sleeper, I sprang across the room and grasped the rigid, hairy forearms. Heavens! Never have I felt such muscles, such tendons, as those beneath the hirsute skin!
"Well, you are a restless sleeper, captain!" said this man: "I dropped in here just now, thinking to find Dennis Wayman, and I've been looking on while you finished your nap. I never saw a harder sleeper." "I had a bad dream," answered Jernam, starting to his feet. "A bad dream! What about, captain?" "About your daughter!"
Then across in the camp a dog began to bark, at first uncertainly, with what was almost a note of interrogation, and then, as the wind brought confirmation of suspicion to his nostrils, with savage vigour. By the sound, he was apparently approaching the dam. Some sleeper, awakened by the noise, yelled a profane command to the animal, which had no effect.
Moze raised his head and growled low in his throat and sniffed the keen air. "Jones, Jones," I called, reaching over to touch the old hunter. He awoke at once, with the clear-headedness of the light sleeper. "I heard the cry of some beast," I said, "And it was so weird, so strange. I want to know what it was."
They were talking quite unconcernedly by this time, and in, their usual somewhat loud tone of voice, fear of discovery not being one of their characteristics. They were bound to have awakened any light sleeper, but it so happened that they passed no occupied rooms but their Uncle Dawne's. He, however, being up, heard them, and opened his door on them suddenly. They both jumped.
Then she felt as if she ought to get up, and go and see how the troubled sleeper in yonder bed was struggling through his illness; but she could not remember who the sleeper was, and she shrunk from seeing some phantom-face on the pillow, such as now began to haunt the dark corners of the room, and look at her, jibbering and mowing as they looked.
Then she tiptoed to his side, interposed the parasol between him and the sun, and brushed away the flies. After a time, for greater ease, she sat down beside him. An hour passed, during which she occasionally shifted the parasol from one tired hand to the other. At first the sleeper had been restless, but, shielded from the flies and the sun, his breathing became gentler and his movements ceased.
I panted out that I wanted a berth, found that there would be a vacant one on board the "sleeper" at my disposal, and sat down in the smoking-room, ostensibly to wait while the bed was made up for me. I must have been a curious object to look upon in my dishevelled and hybrid costume, not an article of which, save the boots and trousers, had been made for me.
So, as the western sky crimsoned and the shadow of each cornstalk gleamed like copper on its neighbour, the harvest mouse stole down from his eminence and sought his burrow, for, as I have said before, the nest was only a nursery. He was up betimes. He was a light sleeper, and half a noise of that kind would have roused him. It was clank and whirr and swish and rattle in one.
I came out again on the quarter-deck, agreeably at ease in my sleeping suit on that warm breathless night, barefooted, a glowing cigar in my teeth, and, going forward, I was met by the profound silence of the fore end of the ship. Only as I passed the door of the forecastle, I heard a deep, quiet, trustful sigh of some sleeper inside.
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