“Like to be out on a fox-chase to-night myself,” he remarked. “Want to go, when the moon gits up? We kin let you have a horse. No? Well, I reckon I’ll just give ’em a call myself.”
He took down a horn that Lockwood had noticed hanging by the doorway, and went down the steps, listening. A third time the distant call blew, and Jackson answered it in a series of rising and long-falling notes that echoed far away through the pine woods. There was another blast from the distant hunter, and the boy came back and replaced the instrument.
“Show ’em that somebody else kin blow a horn,” he said cheerfully; but as he passed into the light Lockwood noticed that his face was serious. Perhaps he had been losing heavily.
Old Henry dozed peacefully again.
The far-away blowing of the horn of the invisible hunter, the extraordinary wildness and remoteness of the whole scene, the whole episode struck Lockwood’s imagination powerfully.
“Not much like New Orleans, is it?” he remarked, thinking of the rattle and racket of the street past Lyman & Fourget’s motor shop.
“I was thinking of that,” said Louise. “It all seems so strange, though I was brought up in these woods. I never thought it would seem so strange when I came back.”
“How long were you in New Orleans?” he asked.
“Mr. Lockwood, what have you heard about me?” she countered suddenly.
“Why—not much,” he stammered. “I heard that you went away to the city, some years ago. Mighty courageous thing to do, it seems to me.”