He bowed as he spoke, and began to move, slowly and haltingly, across the width of the rocky way to where his negro stood with the two horses.

“Mr. Haward!” called the Governor.

The recreant turned his head.  “Your Excellency?”

“It was the right foot, was it not?” queried his sometime leader.  “Ah, I thought so!  Then it were best not to limp with the left.”

Homeric laughter shook the air; but while Mr. Haward laughed not, neither did he frown or blush.  “I will remember, sir,” he said simply, and at once began to limp with the proper foot.  When he reached the bank he turned, and, standing with his arm around his horse’s neck, watched the company which he had so summarily deserted, as it put itself into motion and went slowly past him up its dusky road.  The laughter and bantering farewells moved him not; he could at will draw a line around himself across which few things could step.  Not far away the bed of the stream turned, and a hillside, dark with hemlock, closed the view.  He watched the train pass him, reach this bend, and disappear.  The axemen and the four Meherrins, the Governor and the gentlemen of the Horseshoe, the rangers, the negroes,—­all were gone at last.  With that passing, and with the ceasing of the laughter and the trampling, came the twilight.  A whippoorwill began to call, and the wind sighed in the trees.  Juba, the negro, moved closer to his master; then upon an impulse stooped, and lifting above his head a great rock, threw it with might into one of the shallow pools.  The crashing sound broke the spell of the loneliness and quiet that had fallen upon the place.  The white man drew his breath, shrugged his shoulders, and turned his horse’s head down the way up which he had so lately come.

The cabin in the valley was not three miles away.  Down this ravine to a level place of pines, through the pines to a strip of sassafras and a poisoned field, past these into a dark, rich wood of mighty trees linked together with the ripening grape, then three low hills, then the valley and the cabin and a pair of starry eyes.  It was full moon.  Once out from under the stifling walls of the ravine, and the silver would tremble through the leaves, and show the path beneath.  The trees, too, that they had blazed,—­with white wood pointing to white wood, the backward way should be easy.

The earth, rising sheer in darkness on either hand, shut in the bed of the stream.  In the warm, scented dusk the locusts shrilled in the trees, and far up the gorge the whippoorwill called and called.  The air was filled with the gold of fireflies, a maze of spangles, now darkening, now brightening, restless and bewildering.  The small, round pools caught the light from the yet faintly colored sky, and gleamed among the rocks; a star shone out, and a hot wind, heavy with the smell of the forest, moved the hemlock boughs and rustled in the laurels.