Page:Taylor - In the Dwellings of the Wilderness.djvu/182

 through a cycle of time, so Merritt felt as though half the night had gone when at length he pulled himself together, guiltily conscious that he ought to go and look for Deane. He yawned, stretched, and got himself to his feet, stupid with sleep, noticing, irrelevantly, that the lamp was still burning, and that the moonlight, coming through the open entrance, turned its light wan and sickly. And then he started, wide awake on the instant, listening with bent head and hands clenching to a sound that came out of the night; a moan, rising and swelling into a scream that split through the stillness, and stopped suddenly as though choked into strangled quiet, with the silence settling deeper than before. The cry came from the excavations. Merritt dashed out of the tent and ran thither, his teeth set hard, every