f rocks and gnarled trees. It
was too inhospitable a region to tempt even the wildest squatter.

The flood of moonlight made the desolation more oppresive than ever, by
making palpable and suggestive the inky abysses under the trees and in
the thickets.

Fortner looked up the road to his right and listened intently.

A waterfall mumbled somewhere in the neighborhood. The pines and
hemlocks near the summit sighed drearily. A gray fox, which had probably
just supped off a pheasant, sat on a log and barked out his gluttonous
satisfaction. A wildcat, as yet superless, screamed its envy from a
cliff a half a mile away.

"I can't heah anything of Aunt Debby an' the others," said Fortner, at
length; "so I reckon they're clean over the mounting, an' bout safe by
this time. Them beasts are purty good travelers, I imagine, an' they
hain't let no grass grow in under the'r hufs."

"But the Rebels are coming, hand over hand," said Harry, who had been
watching to the left and listening. "I hear them quite plainly. Yes,
there they are," he continued, as two or three galloped around a turn in
the road, followed at a little interval by others.

The metallic clang of the rapid hoof-beats on the rocks rang through the
somber aisles of the forest. Noisy fox and antiphonal wildcat stopped to
listen to this invasion of sound.

"Quick! let's get in cover," said Fortner.

"Ye make fur thet rock up thar," said Fortner to Harry, pointing to a
spot several hundred yards above them, "and stay thar tell I come. Keep
close in the shadder, so's they won't see ye."

"It seems to me that I ought to stay with you,' said Harry,
indecisively.

"No; go. Ye can't do no good heah. One's better nor two. I'll be up thar
soon. Go, quick."

There was no time for debate, and Harry did as bidden.

Fortner stepped into the inky shadow of a large rock, against which
he leaned. The great broad face of the rock, gray from its covering of
minute ash-colored lichens, was toward the pursuers, and shone white as
marble in the flood of moonlight. The darkness seemed banked up around
him, but within his arm's length it was as light as day. The long rifle
barrel reached from the darkness into the light, past the corner of the
rock against which it rested. The bright rays made the little "bead"
near the muzzle gleam like a diamond, and lighted up the slit as fine as
a hair in the hind-sight. Three little clicks, as if of twigs breaking
under a rabbit's foot, to