, and it seemed as if here and there a wan face
looked through at the riders wending along the weed-grown path. Where so
many faces had been what wonder that a similitude should linger in the
loneliness! The pallid face seemed to draw back as they glanced up while
slowly pacing around the drive. A rabbit sitting motionless on the front
piazza did not draw back, although observing them with sedate eyes as
he poised himself upright on his haunches, with his listless fore-paws
suspended in the air, and it occurred to Dundas that he was probably
unfamiliar with the presence of human beings, and had never heard the
crack of a gun. A great swirl of swallows came soaring out of the big
kitchen chimneys and circled in the sky, darting down again and again
upward. Through an open passage was a glimpse of a quadrangle, with its
weed-grown spaces and litter of yellow leaves. A tawny streak, a red
fox, sped through it as Dundas looked. A half-moon, all a-tilt, hung
above it. He saw the glimmer through the bare boughs of the leafless
locust-trees here and there still standing, although outside on the lawn
many a stump bore token how ruthlessly the bushwhackers had furnished
their fires.

"That thar moon's a-hangin' fur rain," said the mountaineer, commenting
upon the aspect of the luminary, which he, too, had noticed as they
passed. "I ain't s'prised none ef we hev fallin' weather agin 'fore
day, an' the man--by name Morgan Holden--that hev charge o' the hotel
property can't git back fur a week an' better."

A vague wonder to find himself so suspicious flitted through his mind,
with the thought that perhaps the colonel might have reckoned on this
delay. "Surely the ruvers down yander at Knoxville mus' be a-boomin',
with all this wet weather," he said to himself.

Then aloud: "Morgan Holden he went ter Col-bury ter 'tend ter some
business in court, an' the ruvers hev riz so that, what with the bredges
bein' washed away an' the fords so onsartain an' tricky, he'll stay till
the ruver falls. He don't know ye war kemin', ye see. The mail-rider hev
quit, 'count o' the rise in the ruver, an' thar's no way ter git word
ter him. Still, ef ye air minded ter wait, I'll be powerful obligated
fur yer comp'ny down ter my house till the ruver falls an' Holden he
gits back."

The stranger murmured his obligations, but his eyes dwelt lingeringly
upon the old hotel, with its flapping doors and its shattered windows.
Through the recurrent vistas