“But the horse?” she said, hesitating.
“Leave it,” he replied. “The brute is the best among you, but whither we go no horse may follow.”
He turned, taking up the boy in his arms, and she dumbly followed him, trembling, faint, yet nerved by her fears to unusual exertion. So rapid was his gait, encumbered though he was, that she kept him in view with difficulty. Through the gloom she could divine the perils that environed their ever upward way. The grinding of stricken trees, the brawl of swollen waters harrowed her nerves not less than the partial gleams of unmeasured heights and depths revealed by the lightning. A sense of helplessness exaggerated these terrors among the unknown possibilities surrounding her.
It seemed as though they would never stop again. Her limbs trembled, her heart thumped suffocatingly, yet their guide gave no heed, but pressed on as though no shivering woman pantingly dogged his steps. They traveled thus for several miles. She felt herself giving way totally when, on looking up once more, she saw that the hunter had vanished.
“Where am I?” she cried, and a voice, issuing seemingly out of the mountain-side, bade her come on. Her hands struck a wall of rock; on her right a precipice yawned; so, groping toward the left, she felt as she advanced that she was leaving the outer air; the wind and rain no longer beat upon her, yet the darkness was intense.
She heard the voice of the boy calling upon her to keep near. Into the bowels of the mountains she felt her way until a gleam of light shone ahead. She hastened forward round a shoulder of rock into a roomy aperture branching from the main cavern. The boy lay upon a pallet of skins, while Herne the Hunter fixed the flaring pine-knot he had lighted into a crevice of the rock. Then he started a fire, drew out of another crevice some cold cooked meat and filled a gourd with water from a spring that trickled out at one end of the cave.
“Eat,” he said, waving his hand. “Eat—that ye may not die. The more unfit to live, the less prepared for death. Eat!”
With that he turned away and busied himself in bathing and bandaging the boy's foot, which, though not severely sprained, was for the time quite painful. Mrs. Renfro now threw back the hood of her waterproof and laid the cloak aside. Even old Herne—women hater that he was—could not have found fault with the matronly beauty of her face, unless with its expression of self-satisfied worldliness, as of one who judged others and herself solely by conventional standards, shaped largely by flattery and conceit.
She was hungry—her fears were somewhat allayed, and though rather disgusted at such coarse diet, ate and drank with some relish. Meanwhile, Herne the Hunter turned from the boy for something, and beheld her face for the first time. A water-gourd fell from his hands, his eyes dilated, and he crouched as he gazed like a panther before its unsuspecting prey. Every fibre of his frame quivered, and drops of cold sweat stood out upon his forehead. The boy saw with renewed fear this new phase of old Herne's dreaded idiosyncrasies. Mrs. Renfro at length raised her eyes and beheld him thus. Instantly he placed his hands before his face, and abruptly left the cavern. Alarmed at his appearance, she ran toward the boy, exclaiming:
“What can be the matter with him? Do you know him?”