me to the edge of that wood an'
stayed thar a while, watchin' us. I'd have follered him, but I couldn't
leave my beat here, an' you're the first officer I've saw since. It may
amount to nothin, an' then again it mayn't."

"I'm glad you told me. I'll go into the grove myself and see if anybody
is there now."

"Leftenant, if I was you I'd be mighty keerful. If it's a spy it'll be
easy enough for him under the cover of the trees to shoot you in the
open comin' toward him."

Harry knew that Jackson planned a surprise of some kind and Seth Moore's
words about the mounted man alarmed him. He did not doubt the accuracy
of the young mountaineer's eyesight, or his coolness, and he resolved
that he would not go back to headquarters until he knew more about that
"shadow." But Moore's advice about caution was not to be unheeded.

"If you keep in the edge of our woods here," said Moore, "an' ride along
a piece you'll come to a little valley. Then you kin go up that an' come
into the grove over thar without being seed."

"Good advice. I'll take it."

Harry loosened one of the pistols in his belt and rode cautiously
through the wood as Seth Moore had suggested. The ground sloped rapidly,
and soon he reached the narrow but deep little valley with a dense
growth of trees and underbrush on either side. The valley led upward,
and he came into the grove just as Moore had predicted.

This forest was of much wider extent than he had supposed. It stretched
northward further than he could see, and, although it was devoid of
undergrowth, it was very dark among the trees. He rode his horse behind
the trunk of a great oak, and, pausing there, examined all the forest
within eyeshot.

He saw nothing but the long rows of tree trunks, white on the northern
side with snow, and he heard nothing but the cold rustle of wind among
boughs bare of branches. Yet he had full confidence in the words of
Seth Moore. He could neither see him nor hear him, but he was sure that
somebody besides himself was in the wood. Once more the soul and spirit
of his great ancestor were poured into him, and for the moment he, too,
was the wilderness rover, endowed with nerves preternaturally acute.

Hidden by the great tree trunks he listened attentively. His horse,
oppressed by the cold and perhaps by the weariness of the day, was
motionless and made no sound. He waited two or three minutes and then he
was sure that he heard a slight noise, which he believed was mad