At times, these dimly defined forms became terrifying monsters of the night, guarding the road along which she passed, like fabulous creatures of fairy-land protecting the approach to some magic domain. Vague, silent, mysterious, they loomed up on either hand—gigantic, somber sentinels.
The chill of the night air, which lay heavily in the shadowy ravines, between the uplifting hills, penetrated her clothing and seemed to reach with its benumbing breath her very heart, yet she pressed on, undaunted.
She paused a brief moment at a small brook that crossed the road on the way to the quarry, and as she listened there came the dull hoof-tread of approaching horses—a cavalcade, it seemed, as she hearkened in sudden nervous terror, for the raiders were evidently close at hand.
Were they coming from, or going to the quarry?
For the moment she could not decide whether the sound was behind or in front of her. The reverberant hills seemed to be playing pranks with the echoes, and as she sat motionless on her horse and listened, a feeling of faintness came over her at the possibility of the sound's direction.
What if she were too late, and the raiders, returning from the old quarry, had already wreaked their vengeance on the hapless victim? The thought appalled her in its cruel suggestion, and her heart grew heavy with forebodings; then close upon her terror and despair the glad fact rushed to her relief that the horsemen were behind, not in front of her, and there was yet time in which to state her lover's case.
The raiders' rendezvous lay beyond, some little distance up the road, as she remembered its location in bygone days. There was scarcely time to reach it before the hurrying horses. Perhaps it would be the better plan to conceal herself somewhere amid the shadows along the road until the cavalcade had passed, then quickly follow.
She recalled to mind that a little further down the brook was a thicket of water willows, now a splotch of blackness in the vague landscape, and, after a moment's hesitation, she turned her horse's head in this direction.
Scarcely had the obscurity of the spot enfolded her, when the raiders came sweeping by—an ominous shadowy band, crossing the shallow stream at the place she had but recently quitted, then galloping rapidly along the road which rose sharply toward the hill where lay the place of meeting.
The quarry was hollowed out of the far side of the hill, around whose base the stream wound lazily, and to go by way of the winding road was a more circuitous route, while to climb the hill shortened the distance greatly.