A sound.
'Hist!' said the sheriff.
The moon, low in the west, was drawing a seine of fine-spun gold across the dark depths of the valley. In that enchanted enmeshment were tangled all the fancies of the night; the vague magic of dreams; vagrant romances, dumb but for the pulses; the gleams of a poetry too delicately pellucid to be focused by a pen. The mountains maintained a majesty of silence. All the world beneath was still. The wind was laid.
Far, far away, once again, a sound.
So indistinct, so undistinguishable—they hardly knew if they had heard aright. There was a sudden scuffle near at hand. Over one of the rail fences, gleaming wet with dew, and rich with the loan of a silver beam, there climbed a long, lean old hound; with an anxious aspect he ran to the verge of the crag. Once more that sound, alien alike to the mountain solitudes and the lonely sky; then the deep-mouthed baying broke forth, waking all the echoes, and rousing all the dogs in the cove as well as the canine visitors and residents at the Settlement.
'Dod-rot that critter!' exclaimed the sheriff angrily. 'We can't hear nuthin' now but his long jaw.'
'Jes' say "Silence in court!"' suggested Amos James from where he lay at length in the grass.
The sheriff nimbly kicked the dog instead, and the night was filled with wild shrieks of pain and anger. When his barking was renewed, it was punctuated with sharp, reminiscent yelps, as the injustice of his treatment ever and anon recurred to his mind.
The sound of human voices grew very distinct when it could be heard at all, and the tramp of approaching horses shook the ground.
Every eye was turned toward the point at which the road came into the Settlement, between the densities of the forest and the gleaming array of shining, curved blades and tossing plumes, where the corn-field spread its martial suggestions. When an equestrian shadow suddenly appeared, the sheriff saluted it in a tremor of excitement.