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 prehension. He had only his physical senses to rely upon, and these gave him no warning. For all his seventy years, his vision was keener than that of most young men, his hearing as acute as it had ever been. But the keenest eyes cannot see that which is invisible; the sharpest ears cannot detect a presence which makes no sound.

No sound came from the myrtle thicket, from the tall broom grass waving gently in the light breeze, from the great black oak trunk at the crest of the slope. Even the smaller folk of the woods seemed unaware of hidden presences in two of these three hiding places. A wren perched on a twig of the myrtle not six inches from the ground and sang for a quarter of an hour with scarcely a pause for breath. A cottontail came out of the swamp and nibbled contentedly at certain appetizing weed stems at the very verge of the broom grass clump. But no bird or little beast ventured close to the black oak trunk forty yards behind the stump where Mayfield sat; and a big iron-gray fox squirrel, which had been exploring the branches of the oak, now lay flattened against an upper limb, staring glassily downward, afraid to move, almost afraid to breathe.

An hour passed. It was now mid-afternoon. The dun figure on the pine stump still held almost exactly the same pose, except that the white head