Unable
in the darkness to penetrate the thickets of man-
zanita and other undergrowth, utterly bewildered
and overcome with fatigue, he had lain down near
the root of a large madrono and fallen into a dream-
less sleep. It was hours later, in the very middle of
the night, that one of God's mysterious messengers,
gliding ahead of the incalculable host of his com-
panions sweeping westward with the dawn line,
pronounced the awakening word in the ear of the
sleeper, who sat upright and spoke, he knew not
why, a name, he knew not whose.
Halpin Frayser was not much of a philosopher,
nor a scientist. The circumstance that, waking from
a deep sleep at night in the midst of a forest, he had
spoken aloud a name that he had not in memory
and hardly had in mind did not arouse an en-
lightened curiosity to investigate the phenomenon.
He thought it odd, and with a little perfunctory
shiver, as if in deference to a seasonal presumption
that the night was chill, he lay down again and
went to sleep. But his sleep was no longer dreamless.
He thought he was walking along a dusty road
that showed white in the gathering darkness of a
summer night. Whence and whither it led, and why
he travelled it, he did not know, though all seemed
simple and natural, as is the way in dreams; for in
the Land Beyond the Bed surprises cease from
troubling and the judgment is at rest. Soon he came
to a parting of the ways; leading from the highway
was a road less travelled, having the appearance, in-
deed, of having been long abandoned, because, he
thought, it led to something evil; yet he turned into
it without hesitation, impelled by some imperious
necessity.
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