yours."

David murmured a pleased, bashful assent. They had now reached the
buffalo track, which was not wide enough for the three to ride abreast.
It was therefore necessary for them to fall into single file, and David
managed to get the lead. This made him feel better, and more of a man,
for the darkness was still deep, and the black boughs overhead still
hung low and heavy. Neither of the horsemen spoke again for a long time
after entering upon the buffalo track. Once more the only sound was the
steady, muffled beating of the horses' swiftly moving feet. The two men
were buried in their own thoughts of duties and aims far beyond the
boy's understanding, and he was not thinking of these silent companions
by his side--he was scarcely thinking at all; he was merely feeling. He
was held under a spell, dumb and breathless, enchanted by the mystery of
the wilderness at night.

It was so black, so beautiful, so terrible, so soundless, so motionless,
so unfathomable. There was no moon. The few pale stars glimmered dimly
far above the dark arches of the trees. No bird moved among the sable
branches, or even twittered in its sleep as if disturbed by the light,
swift passing of the shadowy horsemen. No wild animal stirred in his
uneasy rest or even breathed less deeply in his hunting dreams, at the
flitting of the shadows across his hidden lair.

The mystery, the beauty, and the terror went beyond the black border of
the forest. Out in the open and over the clearing, the mists from the
swamp mingling with the darkness gave everything a look of fantastic
unreality yet wilder than it had worn earlier in the night. Dense
earth-clouds were thus massed about the base of Anvil Rock. Its
blackened peak loomed through the clouds,--a strange, wild sight,
apparently belonging neither to earth or to heaven. But far beyond and
above was a stranger, wilder sight still; the strangest and wildest of
all; one of the strangest and wildest, surely, that human eyes ever
rested upon.

There across the northern sky sped the great comet. Come, none ever knew
whence, and speeding none ever knew whither, it reached on that
night--on this fifteenth of October--the summit of its swift, awful,
arching flight. It was now at the greatest of its terrible splendor and
appalling beauty. It was now at the very height of its boundless
influence over the hopes and fears of the superstitious, romantic,
emotional, poetic race which was struggling to people th