Milton came down and out presently, saying that he just remembered having lent the weapon. “’Tother’s no good,” he added; “yeh don’t need no pistol anyway. Th’ moon’ll be up direc’ly.”
Albert gathered up the lines, and drove out slowly toward the road.
“Yeh better save th’ beasts till after yeh git over Tallman’s hill, ’n’ rest ’em there by th’ gulf!” Milton called after him, as a last injunction.
The hired man stood at the stable door, and watched the buggy pass the darkened, silent house, turn out on the high-road, and disappear beneath the poplars. The moon was just coming up, beyond this line of trees, and it made the gloom of their shadow deeper. His eyes, from following the vehicle ranged back to the house, which reared itself black against the whitening sky. There was there no sound, nor any sign of life. He took a revolver out of his pocket, and examined it in the starlight, cocking it again and again to make sure that there had been no mistake. Satisfied with the inspection, he put it back in his side coat-pocket. He went upstairs, changed his hat, took a drink out of a flat brown bottle in his cupboard, and spent a minute or two looking at one of the tin-type portraits on the mantel-shelf. He held the picture to the light, and grinned as he gazed—then put it in his breast pocket, blew out the lamp, and felt his way softly down stairs.
A few minutes later he came out from the stable, leading the swift black mare. She was saddled and bridled, and seemed to understand, as he led her over the grass, that he wanted no noise made. The man and beast, throwing long, grotesque shadows on the lawn, in the light of the low moon, stole past the house, and out upon the road. Milton here climbed into the saddle, and with an exultant little cluck, started in the direction his master had gone, still keeping the black mare on the grass. They, too, disappeared under the poplars.
The moon mounted into the heavens, pushing aside the aspiring clouds which sought to dispute her passage, then clothing them in her own livery of light, and drawing them upward after her, in a glittering train of attendance. All over the hill-side the calm radiance rested. The gay hues with which autumn’s day brush painted the woods, the hedge rows, the long stretches of orchard, stubble, and field, sought now to only hint at their beauty, as they yielded new outlines, mystic suggestions of form and color, in the soft gray picture of mezzotint. Thin films of vapor rose to enwrap the feet of the dark firs, nearer to the sky, and in the valley below the silver of the moonlight lost itself on the frost-like whiteness of the gathering mist. It was a night for the young to walk together, and read love’s purest, happiest thoughts in each other’s eyes—for the old to drink in with thankful confession the faith that the world was still gracious and good.
Milton was walking the mare now, still on the grass. He could hear the sound of wheels, just ahead.