Audrey

Haward had expected to hear a noise of savage triumph, and to see dark

figures moving about their handiwork. There was no noise, and the

moonlight showed no living being. The night was changelessly still and

bright; the tragedy had been played, and the mountains and the hills and

the running water had not looked.

It took but a few minutes to break through the rustling corn and reach the

smouldering logs. Once before them, there seemed naught to do but to stand

and stare at the ruin, until a tongue of flame caught upon a piece of

uncharred wood, and showed them the body of the pioneer lying at a little

distance from the stone that had formed his doorstep. At a sign from

Haward the negro went and turned it over, then, let it sink again into the

seared grass. "Two arrows, Marse Duke," he said, coming back to the

other's side. "An' they've taken his scalp."

Three times Haward made the round of the yet burning heap. Was it only

ruined and fallen walls, or was it a funeral pyre as well? To know, he

must wait for the day and until the fire had burned itself out. If the

former were the case, if the dead man alone kept the valley, then now,

through the forest and the moonlight, captives were being haled to some

Indian village, and to a fate more terrible than that of the man who lay

there upon the grass with an arrow through his heart.

If the girl were still alive, yet was she dead to him. He was no Quixote

to tilt with windmills. Had a way to rescue her lain fair before him, he

would have risked his life without a thought. But the woods were deep and

pathless, and only an Indian could find and keep a trail by night. To

challenge the wilderness; to strike blindly at the forest, now here, now

there; to dare all, and know that it was hopeless daring,--a madman might

do this for love. But it was only Haward's fancy that had been touched,

and if he lacked not courage, neither did he lack a certain cool good

sense which divided for him the possible from that which was impossible,

and therefore not to be undertaken.

Turning from the ruin, he walked across the trampled sward to the

sugar-tree in whose shade, in the golden afternoon, he had sung to his

companions and to a simple girl. Idle and happy and far from harm had the

valley seemed.

"Here shall he see

No enemy

But winter and rough weather."

Suddenly he found that he was trembling, and that a sensation of faintness

and of dull and sick revolt against all things under the stars was upon

him. Sitting down in the shadow of the tree, he rested his face in his

hands and shut his eyes, preferring the darkness within to that outer

night which hid not and cared not, which was so coldly at peace. He was

young, and though stories of such dismal things as that before him were

part of the stock in trade of every ancient, garrulous man or woman of his

acquaintance, they had been for him but tales; not horrible truths to

stare him in the face. He had seen his father die; but he had died, in his

bed, and like one who went to sleep.