“It must have been great to have met here and planned their raids,” said another boy, looking around him.
“Wish I could see what one looked like,” said Bob Gilmore.
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when something happened which left the boys speechless with wonder. There was a soft flare of light near them and they all turned their heads toward the end of the camp nearest the foot of the mountains, to where a flat, moss-covered rock jutted out. There on the rock, lighted by the soft, noiseless glow, was a black horse and seated upon it, a rider dressed entirely in black, with a wide black hat pulled over his face. The glow burned only for a brief second, but in that second horse and rider stared straight ahead, and then the flare went out, and the Black Rider and his black horse disappeared from view.
CHAPTER XV
MUTINY
The silence that succeeded the vision of the Black Rider on the rock was a vast and throbbing one, and the senses of the boys reeled slightly under the shock. Ted still stood in his position staring toward the rock on which the fascinating thing had showed, his heart beating like a trip-hammer and his mouth curiously dry. In the very atmosphere there was a sense of unreality.
The figure had been real, yet ghostly. All of them were sure that they had seen an actual man seated on a very real horse exposed for an instant on the rock, and yet the very immoveableness of it inspired a feeling of awe. There was no second flush of light and nothing broke the silence.
Then the tongues of the boys were unloosed like a flood and they all talked at once. They scrambled to their feet, confused and uncertain. The fire had burned so low that the darkness pressed in tightly upon them, and a few, with more presence of mind than the rest, threw some fresh wood on the fire, where it blazed up and dimly showed the rock upon which the Black Rider had appeared. But there was no sign of him now.
“What in the world do you suppose that was?” Buck demanded, bounding to Ted’s side.
“You certainly have me,” was the fervent reply. “I never saw anything like it in my life. Bob had just said that he would like to see a Black Rider and one just glowed out. It is beyond me.”
“If anybody believes in ghosts, that was surely a ghost of a former Black Rider,” said Buck. “But there is a trick in it somewhere. Look how he just glowed and then went out. Come on, let’s investigate that rock.”