For a moment the moon looked upon the huge and terrible figure, and then, as if struck with deadly fear at the awful sight, hid itself behind a dark cloud.
When it again came forth, the strange and terrible being, that wore the figure of a wolf and the face of a man, had disappeared, swallowed up in the gloom of the forest.
Once again the creatures of the night came forth. Again the shrill cries broke the stillness of the wood.
CHAPTER I.
THE MARK ON THE TREE.
Two rifle-“cracks” broke the stillness of the wilderness, that stretched in one almost unbroken line from the Alleghany and Blue Ridge peaks to the Ohio river. The reports re-echoed over the broad expanse of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers, for the shots were fired near the junction of the two streams—fired so nearly at the same time that the two seemed almost like one report.
Then, before the smoke of the rifles had curled lazily upward in spiral rings on the air, came a crash in the tangled underbrush, and forth into a little open glade—the work of Nature’s master hand—dashed a noble buck. The red stream bursting from a wound just behind the shoulder and staining crimson the glossy brown coat of the forest lord, told plainly that he was stricken unto death.
The buck gained the center of the glade, then his stride weakened; the dash through the thicket was the last despairing effort of the poor brute to escape from the invisible foes whose death-dealing balls had pierced his side.
With a moan of pain, almost human in its expression, the buck fell upon his knees, then rolled over on his side, dead.
The brute had fallen near the trunk of a large oak tree—a tree distinguished from its neighbors by a blazon upon its side, whereon, in rude characters, some solitary hunter had cut his name.