for me, I'm going by the Gauley." And I
turned El Mahdi into the wooded road on the left of the turnpike.

For a moment the two hesitated, discussing something which I could not
hear. Then they rode up out of the Stone Coal and came clattering after
me.

It is wonderful how swiftly the night comes in among the boles of the
great oak trees. The dark seems to rise upward from the earth. The
sounds of men and beasts carry over long distance, drifting in among the
trees, and the loneliness of the vast, empty earth comes back to
us,--what is forgotten in the rush of the sunshine,--the constant loom
of the mystery. One understands then why the early men feared the plains
when it was dark, and huddled themselves together in the hills. Who
could say what ugly, dwarfish things, what evil fairies, what dangerous
dead men might climb up over the rim of the world? A man was not afraid
of the grey wolf, or even the huge beast that trumpeted in the morass by
the great water when the light was at his back, but when the world was
darkened old men had seen strange shapes running by the wolf's muzzle,
or groping with the big mastodon in the marsh land, and against these a
stone axe was a little weapon.

Of all animals, man alone has this fear of the dark. Neither the horse
nor the steer is afraid of shadows, and from these, as he travels
through the night, a man may feed the springs of his courage. I have
been scared when I was little, stricken with panic when night caught me
on the hills, and have gone down among the cattle and stood by their
great shoulders until I felt the fear run off me like water, and have
straightway marched out as brave as any trooper of an empress. And from
those earliest days when I rode, with the stirrups crossed on my
brother's saddle, after some kind old straying ox, I was always
satisfied to go where the horse would go. He could see better than I,
and he could hear better, and if he tramped peacefully, the land was
certainly clear of any evil thing.

We crossed the long wooded hill clattering like a troop of the queen's
cavalry, and turned down toward the great level bow which the road makes
before it crosses the Gauley. There was a dim light rising beyond the
flat lands where the crooked elves toiled with their backs against the
golden moon. But they were under the world yet, with only the yellow
haze shining through the door. This was the acre of ghosts. Tale after
tale I had heard, sitting on the kn