h farther away, the rider coming up from the
southward stopped, heard the tread of the horse approaching in front,
and in hasty trepidation turned his own animal a few steps aside in the
forest. He would have made them more but for the tell-tale crackle of
dead branches strewed underfoot by the March winds. He sat for a long
time very quiet, peering and hearkening. But the other had heard, or at
least thought he had heard, the crackle of dead branches, and was taking
the same precautions.

The advantage, however, was with the rider from the south, who knew,
while the other only feared, there was something ahead it were better to
see than be seen by. About the same time the one concluded his ears
might have deceived him, the other had divined exactly what had
happened. Thereupon the shrewder man tied his horse and stole
noiselessly to a point from whose dense shade he could see a short piece
of the road and the house standing out in the moonlight.

The only two front windows in it that had shades were in Mrs. March's
bed-chamber. The room was brightly lighted and the shades drawn down.
The rest of the house was quite dark. The man hiding so near these signs
noted them, but drew no hasty conclusions. He hoped to consider them
later, but his first need was to know who, or, at least where, the
person was whom he had heard upon the road.

Though already well hidden he crouched behind a log, and upon the piece
of road and every shadowy cover of possible approach threw forward an
alert scrutiny supported by the whole force of his shrewdest
conjectures. The sounds and silences that belong to the night in field
and forest were far and near. Across the moon a mottled cloud floated
with the slowness of a sleeping fish, a second, third, and fourth as
slowly followed, the shadow of a dead tree crawled over a white stone
and left it in the light; but the enigma remained an enigma still. It
might be that the object of conjecture had fled in the belief that the
conjecturer was none other than Widewood's master. But, in that same
belief, who could say he might not be lying in ambush within close
gunshot of the horse to which the conjecturer dared not now return? In
those hills a man would sometimes lie whole days in ambush for a
neighbor, and one need not be a coward to shudder at the chance of being
assassinated by mistake. To wait on was safest, but it was very tedious.
Yet soon enough, and near and sudden enough, seemed the appeara