seemed so long that the world grew gray with age and sin, and the haunted forest, having fulfilled its purpose in this monstrous culmination of its terrors, vanished out of his consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the apparition stood within a pace, regarding him with the mindless malevolence of a wild brute; then thrust its hands forward and sprang upon him with appalling ferocity!  The act released his physical energies without unfettering his will; his mind was still spellbound, but his powerful body and agile limbs, endowed with a blind, insensate life of their own, resisted stoutly and well.  For an instant he seemed to see this unnatural contest between a dead intelligence and a breathing mechanism only as a spectator - such fancies are in dreams; then he regained his identity almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the straining automaton had a directing will as alert and fierce as that of its hideous antagonist.

But what mortal can cope with a creature of his dream?  The imagination creating the enemy is already vanquished; the combat’s result is the combat’s cause.  Despite his struggles - despite his strength and activity, which seemed wasted in a void, he felt the cold fingers close upon his throat.  Borne backward to the earth, he saw above him the dead and drawn face within a hand’s breadth of his own, and then all was black.  A sound as of the beating of distant drums - a murmur of swarming voices, a sharp, far cry signing all to silence, and Halpin Frayser dreamed that he was dead.

IV

A warm, clear night had been followed by a morning of drenching fog.  At about the middle of the afternoon of the preceding day a little whiff of light vapor - a mere thickening of the atmosphere, the ghost of a cloud - had been observed clinging to the western side of Mount St. Helena, away up along the barren altitudes near the summit.  It was so thin, so diaphanous, so like a fancy made visible, that one would have said: “Look quickly! in a moment it will be gone.”