CHAPTER XLVIII
THE SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE
Along the dark turnpike John Valiant rode with his chin sunk on his breast. He was wretchedly glad of the darkness, for it covered a thousand familiar sights he had grown to love. Yet through the dark came drifting sounds that caught at him with clutching hands—the bay of a hound from some far-off kennel, the whirring note of frogs, the impatient high whinny of a horse across pasture-bars—and his nostrils widened to the wild braided fragrance of the fields over which the mist was spinning its fairy carded wool.
The preparations for his going had been quickly made. He was leaving behind him all but a single portmanteau. Uncle Jefferson had already taken this—with Chum—to the station. The old man had now gone sorrowfully afoot to the blockhouse, a half-mile up the track, to bespeak the stopping of the express. He would go back on the horse his master was riding.
The lonely little depot flanked a siding beside a dismal stretch of yellow clay-bank gouged by rains. Its windows were dark and the weather-beaten plank platform was illuminated by a single lantern that hung on a nail beside the locked door, its sickly flame showing bruise-like through smoky streakings of lamp-black. At one side, in the shadow, was his bag, and beside it the tethered bulldog—sole spot of white against the melancholy forlornness—lying with one splinted leg, like a swaddled ramrod, sticking straight out before him.
In the saddle, Valiant struck his hand hard against his knee. Surely it was a dream! It could not be that he was leaving Virginia, leaving Damory Court, leaving her! But he knew that it was not a dream.
Far away, rounding Powhattan Mountain, he heard the long-drawn hoot of the coming train, flinging its sky-warning in a host of scampering echoes. Among them mixed another sound far up the desolate road, coming nearer—the sound of a horse, galloping fast and hard.
His own fidgeted, flung up wide nostrils and neighed shrilly. Who was coming along that runnelled highway at such an hour in such breakneck fashion?