Sentry-duty was discarded for the night, and the corral left empty of life; I ordered that quiet be maintained in the cave, and the electric lights turned down to a glimmer.

As soon as it was good and dark, I shut off the current from all the fences, and then groped my way out to the embankment bordering our side of the great dynamite ditch. I crept to the top of it and lay there on the slant of the muck to watch. But it was too dark to see anything. As for sounds, there were none. The stillness was deathlike. True, there were the usual night-sounds of the country — the whir of night-birds, the buzzing of insects, the barking of distant dogs, the mellow lowing of far-off kine — but these didn’t seem to break the stillness, they only intensified it, and added a grewsome melancholy to it into the bargain.