?

Leading the captive, he rode back to the trail and pushed on toward
the village. But his adventures were not over yet. At the bottom of
the hill the mare, brought up to a stand, reared and shied violently.
Then she stood trembling like an aspen, seizing every opportunity to
edge from the trail, and all the while staring with wild, dilated eyes
away out toward the bush on the right front. Her rider followed the
direction of her gaze to ascertain the cause of the trouble. For some
minutes he could distinguish nothing unusual in the darkness. The moon
had not as yet attained much power, and gave him very little
assistance; but, realizing the wonderful acuteness of a horse's
vision, he decided that there nevertheless was something to be
investigated. So he dismounted, and adopting the common prairie method
of scanning the sky-line, he dropped to the ground.

For some time his search was quite vain, and only the mare's nervous
state encouraged him. Then at length, low down in the deep shadow of
the bush, something caught and held his attention. Something was
moving down there.

He lay quite still, watching intently. Something of the mare's nervous
excitement gripped him. The movement was ghostly. It was only a
movement. There was nothing distinct to be seen, nothing tangible;
just a weird, nameless something. A dozen times he asked himself what
it was. But the darkness always baffled him, and he could find no
answer. He had an impression of great flapping wings--such wings as
might belong to a giant bat. The movement was sufficiently regular to
suggest this, but the idea carried no conviction. There, however, his
conjectures ended.

At last he sprang up with a sharp ejaculation, and his hand went to
his revolver. The thing, or creature, whatever it was, was coming
slowly but steadily toward him. Had he not been sure of this, the
attitude of the horses would have settled the question for him. Lady
Jezebel pulled back in the throes of a wild fear, and the buckskin
plunged madly to get free.

He had hardly persuaded them to a temporary calmness, when a mournful
cry, rising in a wailing crescendo, split the air and died away
abruptly. And he knew that it came from the advancing "movement."

And now it left the shadow and drew out into the moonlight. And the
man watching beheld a dark heap distinctly outlined midway toward the
bush. The wings seemed to have folded themselves, or, at least, to
have lowered, and were tra