ole over him and seemed
real.

He had the feeling that the old tree outside the door still held its
beneficent spell and that this magic would regulate for him those
elements of chance and luck without which he could not hope to survive
until Dorothy and Uncle Jase came back--and Dorothy had started on a
hard journey over broken and pitch-black distances.

Fanciful as was this figment of a sick imagination, the result was the
same as though it had been a valid conviction, for after a while Old Man
Caleb roused himself and stretched his long arms. Then he rose and
peered at the clock with his face close to its dial, and once more he
replenished the fire.

"Hit's past midnight now, Bas," he complained with a querulous note of
anxiety in his words. "I'm plum tetchious an' worrited erbout Dorothy."

For an avowed lover the seated man gave the impression of churlish
unresponsiveness as he made his grumbling reply.

"I reckon she hain't goin' ter come ter no harm. She hain't nobody's
sugar ner salt."

Caleb ran his talon-like fingers through his mane of gray hair and shook
his patriarchal head.

"Ther fords air all plum ragin' an' perilous atter a fresh like this....
I hain't a-goin' ter enjoy no ease in my mind ef _somebody_ don't go in
s'arch of her--an' hit jedgmatically hain't possible fer me ter go
myself."

Slowly, unwillingly, and with smouldering fury Rowlett rose from his
chair.

He was a self-declared suitor, a man who had boasted that no night was
too wild for him to ride, and a refusal in such case would stultify his
whole attitude and standing in that house.

"I reckon ye'll suffer me ter ride yore extry critter, won't ye?" he
inquired, glumly, "an' loan me a lantern, too."

* * * * *

After the setting of the moon the night had become a void of blackness,
but it was a void in which shadows crowded, all dark but some more
inkily solid than others--and of these shadows some were forests, some
precipices, and some chasms lying trap-like between.

Dorothy Harper and the mule she rode were moving somewhere through this
world of sooty obscurity.

Sometimes in the bottoms, where the way ran through soft shale, teaming
wheels had cut hub-deep furrows where a beast could break a leg with a
miscalculated step. Sometimes, higher up, a path wide enough only for
the setting down of foot before foot skirted a cliff's edge--and the
storm might at any point have washed even that