t, appeared from the tavern stables; and we walked back to the inn
together.

Once more I took her in my arms; then she gently drew away and entered
the open door, hands outstretched as though blinded, feeling her
way--that was the last I saw of her, feeling her dark way alone into
the house.

Senses swimming, dumb, deafened by the raging, beating pulses hammering
in my brain, I reeled at a gallop into the sunny street, north, then
west, then north once more, tearing out into the Butlersbury road. A
gate halted me; I dismounted and dragged it open, then to horse again,
then another gate, then on again, hailed and halted by riflemen at the
cross-roads, which necessitated the summoning of my wits at last before
they would let me go.

Now riding through the grassy cart-road, my shoulders swept by the
fringing willows, I came at length to the Danascara, shining in the
sunlight, and followed its banks--the same banks from which so often in
happier days I had fished. At times I traveled the Tribes Hill road, at
times used shorter cuts, knowing every forest-trail as I did, and
presently entered the wood-road that leads from Caughnawaga church to
Johnstown. I was in Butlersbury; there was the slope, there the Tribes
Hill trail, there the stony road leading to that accursed house from
which the Butlers, father and son, some five years since, had gone
forth to eternal infamy.

And now, set in a circle of cleared land and ringed by the ancient
forests of the north, I saw the gray, weather-beaten walls of the
house. The lawns were overgrown; the great well-sweep shattered; the
locust-trees covered with grapevines--the cherry- and apple-trees to
the south broken and neglected. Weeds smothered the flower-gardens,
where here and there a dull-red poppy peered at me through withering
tangles; lilac and locust had already shed foliage too early blighted,
but the huge and forbidding maples were all aflame in their blood-red
autumn robes. Here the year had already begun to die; in the clear air
a faint whiff of decay came from the rotting heaps of leaves--decay,
ruin, and the taint of death; and, in the sad autumn stillness,
something ominous, something secret and sly--something of malice.

Seeing no sign of my Oneida, I walked my horse across the lawn and up
to the desolate row of windows. The shutters had been ripped off their
hinges; all within was bare and dark; dimly I made out the shadowy
walls of a hallway which divided the ho