“Alas, who can say?” replied the goodwife. “All that I can tell thee is that the cart vanished through the eastern gate, adown the eastern way.”
And now the youth cried to his dappled steed to press on as he had never done before, and galloped through the night to the wildwood. Darker it grew and darker still.
Arriving at length in a little clearing, the squire’s son bade his horse stand halted, and plunged into the wildwood, loudly calling and hallooing for the lost maiden. On and on through briery thicket and stony mire he blundered forward in the gloom. Suddenly an unseen ravine opened beneath him; his feet trod forward into nothingness; his hands caught at the air; and with a cry, he fell. And now as he lay there stunned, strong arms caught him gently up and carried him away.
When he woke to life again, he found himself lying on a bed of skins piled near a fire on a cavern floor. By his side, the torment of his human prison fallen from him like an evil garment, noble and beautiful and strong, stood the Man of the Wildwood.
Before him stood the Man of the Wildwood
Lifting himself up and turning toward his rescuer, the youth poured forth his story and sought the eyes of the Man of the Wildwood for a token that he had understood. For a moment, however, the Man of the Wildwood made no sign. Then, of a sudden, with a gesture at once gentle and commanding, he touched the youth by the hand, and going to the cave mouth, opened his arms to the dark wildwood, and called upon it in its secret speech.
And he bade the things of the wild—the brethren who go afoot, the kindred of the air, and the humble folk who crawl upon the earth—to go forth through the wildwood and find the maiden and guard her well. And he called upon them, too, to follow the thieves, and make them prisoners of the wood.
And now a great murmur, even such a sound as heralds the coming of a mighty rain, swept through the wood. Forth from their dens creeping came the bears, the gray wolves, and the little foxes; the shy deer started in their glens; the birds awakened with a flutter in their nests and took wing into the starry dark; the little wood-mice came tumbling out of their warm beds; and even the spotted snakes went forth to seek. Almost in less time than it takes to tell of it, the earth and the air seemed full of the people of the wild, questing here and there in search of the maid.
There passed a little time, and suddenly a great brown owl, half blinded by the firelight, swooped down to the arch of the cave-mouth with the news that he had found the maiden asleep beneath a sheltering pine; and a moment later a nimble gray hare with upstanding ears came hopping in with the tidings that the thieves had been taken on a wildwood road.