It was blacker than any night I've ever seen before or since; we couldn't see a foot ahead, and the sounds we heard in the woods didn't make us feel any too comfortable, for all we'd got used to living in the open.

We knew, of course, that the sounds came from birds and bats and moths and such, but when a man is out on a job like that his nerves are not what they are at other times--every sound seems unusual and magnified.

I didn't like so much silence from the village down below us--it seemed too quiet; and it appeared to me that the noises we heard in the woods were most too continuous to be caused by only us four.

We went in single file, one man almost touching the other, to be sure we'd all stay together.

I'd hear a bird go whizzing away at a distance, and it appeared to me that there was no call for it to light out with us two or three hundred feet away from it; and then there were queer noises which I couldn't just place as coming from birds.