Some, pausing, made strange
gestures with their hands, erected their arms and lowered them again,
clasped their heads; spread their palms upward, as men are sometimes
seen to do in public prayer.

Not all of this did the child note; it is what would have been noted by
an elder observer; he saw little but that these were men, yet crept like
babes. Being men, they were not terrible, though unfamiliarly clad. He
moved among them freely, going from one to another and peering into
their faces with childish curiosity. All their faces were singularly
white and many were streaked and gouted with red. Something in this--
something too, perhaps, in their grotesque attitudes and movements--
reminded him of the painted clown whom he had seen last summer in the
circus, and he laughed as he watched them. But on and ever on they
crept, these maimed and bleeding men, as heedless as he of the dramatic
contrast between his laughter and their own ghastly gravity. To him it
was a merry spectacle. He had seen his father's negroes creep upon their
hands and knees for his amusement--had ridden them so, "making believe"
they were his horses. He now approached one of these crawling figures
from behind and with an agile movement mounted it astride. The man sank
upon his breast, recovered, flung the small boy fiercely to the ground
as an unbroken colt might have done, then turned upon him a face that
lacked a lower jaw--from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red
gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The
unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave
this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and
breast by the blood of its quarry. The man rose to his knees, the child
to his feet. The man shook his fist at the child; the child, terrified
at last, ran to a tree near by, got upon the farther side of it and took
a more serious view of the situation. And so the clumsy multitude
dragged itself slowly and painfully along in hideous pantomime--moved
forward down the slope like a swarm of great black beetles, with never a
sound of going--in silence profound, absolute.

Instead of darkening, the haunted landscape began to brighten. Through
the belt of trees beyond the brook shone a strange red light, the trunks
and branches of the trees making a black lacework against it. It struck
the creeping figures and gave them monstrous shadows, which caricatured
their movements on t