"And what was the appearance of the moon when fully obscured?" asked Leslie, almost breathless with interest at the strangely graphic words of the Virginian, and no longer wondering, after those words, that there should have been a connection between the mysterious "red woman" and one who seemed so nearly of her mental kin.
"It was no moon," answered Ralston, and his dark eyes seemed to lose all their fierceness and grow inexpressibly sad and solemn as he spoke. "It was no moon! It was a mere unreal shadow and mockery—the dead ghost of a moon that had been, perished long ago, and embodying all the griefs and all the sorrows that had weighed down the heart of man since the Creation. The waters of Niagara lay beneath it, as if under a pall that had settled over a dead world!"
"I should have liked to see it—I would have travelled a thousand miles to see it, had I thought so far!" said Leslie, with the earnestness of a lover of Nature under all her aspects.
"Would you?" said Ralston. "Well, it was something to see once: I should scarcely like to trust the brain of the man who saw it much oftener. I must leave you, but I hope I shall meet you again. Here boy!" beckoning to one of the lounging hack-drivers at the hotel-end of the bridge, "Drive me to the Monteagle. Good-bye!" and away he whirled, leaving Leslie to look after him until out of sight, and to say to himself as he walked up the esplanade over the rapids:
"I thought that I was an oddity and a contradiction, but that fellow can discount me! I don't know half as much about him now, as I did the first moment I saw him!"
CHAPTER XXVII.
Society and Shoulder-Straps at the Falls—Tom Leslie Annexing Canada—Meeting of the New Yorkers—Another Rencontre, a Mysterious Disappearance and a General Wonder.
Tom Leslie was not left to loneliness and his own resources very long at the Cataract, for Walter Lane Harding reached Niagara at noon on Monday, having left New York on Sunday evening. Though even had Leslie been left to his "own resources," these resources were somewhat more numerous than usual, and he was never much in the habit of being so bored by Time as to be obliged to lay plots against its life. In the first place—no, that should be the second place—he had his duties as a newspaper-correspondent at a leading and fashionable resort, which entailed a letter every day, but which did not entail, let us say, the chronicling of the details of hops and evening assemblies, after a manner somewhat scandalously prevalent, with descriptions of the "charming dress worn by Miss A——," the "elegance and grace of the accomplished Miss B——," and all the other disgusting and indecent Jenkinsism of the initials, together with fulsome laudations of the table and even the laundry of the hotel, leading to the impression that the correspondent is upon free board and even free washing! Our cosmopolitan had outlived that phase of callow journalism, long before; and the managing-editor would have been a bold one who should now have proposed to him to re-enter that most contemptible of all literary harness. What he was to write and what he did write, catching up the prevailing topics of conversation and tones of feeling, with sensational descriptions of scenery and incident interspersed like under-tones to joyous music,—men who have hearts, brains and breeding will at once recognize, and others will never know under any detail of information.
What Tom Leslie found it necessary to do in the first place, was to write a letter per day, and occasionally two, to a certain lady temporarily located at West Falls, Oneida County, that lady having very kindly given him her address with permission to use it, and having promised to answer these epistles with brief and maidenly little notes of her own. When it is said that as early as Monday he received one of those notes, and that for an hour thereafter he had very indefinite ideas as to which end of the human figure was intended for the purposes of locomotion, it will be understood that both parties to the compact were carrying out their agreement with praiseworthy faithfulness.