ably as
though he were a Nemesis hunting his enemy down, Hiram followed their
footsteps across the stretch of moonlit open. Then, by and by, he also
was in the shadow of the pines. Here, not a sound broke the midnight
hush. His feet made no noise upon the resinous softness of the ground
below. In that dead, pulseless silence he could distinctly hear the
distant voices of Levi and his companion, sounding loud and resonant
in the hollow of the woods. Beyond the woods was a cornfield, and
presently he heard the rattling of the harsh leaves as the two plunged
into the tasseled jungle. Here, as in the woods, he followed them,
step by step, guided by the noise of their progress through the canes.

Beyond the cornfield ran a road that, skirting to the south of Lewes,
led across a wooden bridge to the wide salt marshes that stretched
between the town and the distant sand hills. Coming out upon this road
Hiram found that he had gained upon those he followed, and that they
now were not fifty paces away, and he could see that Levi's companion
carried over his shoulder what looked like a bundle of tools.

He waited for a little while to let them gain their distance and for
the second time wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve; then,
without ever once letting his eyes leave them, he climbed the fence to
the roadway.

For a couple of miles or more he followed the two along the white,
level highway, past silent, sleeping houses, past barns, sheds, and
haystacks, looming big in the moonlight, past fields, and woods, and
clearings, past the dark and silent skirts of the town, and so, at
last, out upon the wide, misty salt marshes, which seemed to stretch
away interminably through the pallid light, yet were bounded in the
far distance by the long, white line of sand hills.

Across the level salt marshes he followed them, through the rank sedge
and past the glassy pools in which his own inverted image stalked
beneath as he stalked above; on and on, until at last they had reached
a belt of scrub pines, gnarled and gray, that fringed the foot of the
white sand hills.

Here Hiram kept within the black network of shadow. The two whom he
followed walked more in the open, with their shadows, as black as ink,
walking along in the sand beside them, and now, in the dead,
breathless stillness, might be heard, dull and heavy, the distant
thumping, pounding roar of the Atlantic surf, beating on the beach at
the other side of the sand hills,