Overlooking the familiar landscape, he detected an unaccustomed smoke visible a mile or more down the narrow valley. Although but a tiny, hazy curl in the distance, it did not escape the keen eyes of the mountaineer. He could not distinguish tents against the snow, but the location suggested a camp.
The bushwhackers still lingered at the old hotel across the gorge. He could already see in the gathering dusk the firelight glancing fitfully against the window. He wondered if it were visible as far as the camp in the valley.
He stood for a long time, gazing across the snowy steeps at the desolate old building, with the heavy pine forests about it and the crags below—their dark faces seamed with white lines wherever a drift had lodged in a cleft or the interlacing tangles of icy vines might cling. In the pallid dreariness of the landscape and the gray dimness of the hovering night the lighted window blazed with the lambent splendors of some great yellow topaz. His uncontrolled fancy was trespassing upon the scene within. His heart was suddenly all a-throb with keen pain. His idle, vague imaginings of the stalwart horsemen and what they were now doing had revived within him that insatiate longing for the martial life which he had loved, that ineffable grief for the opportunity of brave deeds of value which he felt he had lost.
The drill had taught him the mastery of his muscles, but those more potent forces, his impulses, had known no discipline. A wild inconsequence now possessed him. He took no heed of reason, of prudence. He was dominated by the desire to look in upon the bushwhackers from without—they would never know—undiscovered, unimagined, like some vague and vagrant specter that might wander forlorn in the labyrinthine old house.
With an alert step he turned and strode away into the little cabin. It was very cheerful around the hearth, and the first words he heard reminded him of the season.
His younger brother, a robust lad of thirteen, was drawling reminiscences of other and happier Christmas-tides.
“Sech poppin’ o’ guns ez we-uns used ter hev!” said the tow-headed boy, listlessly swinging his heels against the rungs of the chair.
“The Lord knows thar’s enough poppin’ of guns now!” said his mother. She stooped to insert a knife under the baking hoe-cake for the purpose of turning it, which she did with a certain deft and agile flap, difficult of acquirement and impossible to the uninitiated.
“I ’members,” she added, vivaciously, “we-uns used ter always hev a hollow log charged with powder an’ tech it off fur the Chris’mus. It sounded like thunder—like the cannon the folks hev got nowadays.”