it put itself into motion and went
slowly past him up its dusky road. The laughter and bantering farewells
moved him not; he could at will draw a line around himself across which
few things could step. Not far away the bed of the stream turned, and a
hillside, dark with hemlock, closed the view. He watched the train pass
him, reach this bend, and disappear. The axemen and the four Meherrins,
the Governor and the gentlemen of the Horseshoe, the rangers, the
negroes,--all were gone at last. With that passing, and with the ceasing
of the laughter and the trampling, came the twilight. A whippoorwill began
to call, and the wind sighed in the trees. Juba, the negro, moved closer
to his master; then upon an impulse stooped, and lifting above his head a
great rock, threw it with might into one of the shallow pools. The
crashing sound broke the spell of the loneliness and quiet that had fallen
upon the place. The white man drew his breath, shrugged his shoulders, and
turned his horse's head down the way up which he had so lately come.

The cabin in the valley was not three miles away. Down this ravine to a
level place of pines, through the pines to a strip of sassafras and a
poisoned field, past these into a dark, rich wood of mighty trees linked
together with the ripening grape, then three low hills, then the valley
and the cabin and a pair of starry eyes. It was full moon. Once out from
under the stifling walls of the ravine, and the silver would tremble
through the leaves, and show the path beneath. The trees, too, that they
had blazed,--with white wood pointing to white wood, the backward way
should be easy.

The earth, rising sheer in darkness on either hand, shut in the bed of the
stream. In the warm, scented dusk the locusts shrilled in the trees, and
far up the gorge the whippoorwill called and called. The air was filled
with the gold of fireflies, a maze of spangles, now darkening, now
brightening, restless and bewildering. The small, round pools caught the
light from the yet faintly colored sky, and gleamed among the rocks; a
star shone out, and a hot wind, heavy with the smell of the forest, moved
the hemlock boughs and rustled in the laurels.

The white man and the negro, each leading his horse, picked their way with
caution among the pitfalls of the rocky and uneven road. With the passing
of the Governor and his train a sudden cure had been wrought, for now
Haward's step was as firm and light as it had been before