The old man listened; first he heard the dogs bark at Rich's then at Manuel's and then at black Henry's, nearly a mile away. He shook his head.
"Missy got somep'n on her mind! She don't make no hoss move in de night dat way for nothin'! Too fast! Too fast!"
He went off to his cabin and sat outside to smoke. And in the night the little mare sped away. On the public roads the gait was comparatively safe, and she responded to every call nobly. The unbroken shadows of the roadside glided like walls of gloom! The little vehicle rocked and swayed, and, underneath, the wheels sang a monotonous warning rhyme.
Now and then the little vehicle fairly leaped from the ground, for when Norton, a year previous, had bid in that animal at a blooded-stock sale in Kentucky, she was in her third summer and carried the blood of Wilkes and Rysdyk's Hambletonian, and was proud of it, as her every motion showed.
The little mare had the long route that night, but at last she stood before the doorway of the Cedars. The general was descending the steps as Mary gave Nero the lines.
"What! Mary—"
He feared to ask the question on his lips. She was full of excitement, and her first effort to speak was a dismal failure.
"Come! Come! Come!" he said, in that descending scale of voice which seems to have been made for sympathy and encouragment. "Calm yourself first and talk later." He had his arms around her now and was ascending the steps. "Sit right down here in this big chair; there you are!"
"You have not heard, then?" she said, controlling herself with supreme effort.
"About your father's defeat? Oh, yes. But what of that? There are defeats more glorious than victories, my child. You will find that your father was taken advantage of." She buried her face in her hands.