For a few seconds they stood staring at one another, with scared, astonished eyes. Then the sentry gave a low whistle.
"He must be powerful fond of that little chap," he said.
"If the little chap really slipped past without our seeing him, that will be the third Chanticleer to cross the hills. First there was the little missy at the Academy, then the young chap, then the Mayor."
"Aye, but they didn't do it on an empty stomach—leastways, we know the Crabapple Blossoms didn't, and if the talk in Lud be true, the little chap had had a taste too of what he oughtn't," said another. "But it's another story to go when you're in your right mind. Doctor Leer can't have been in the right when he said all them Magistrates were played out, for it's the bravest thing has ever been done in Dorimare."
Master Nathaniel, for how long he could not have said, went riding up and up the bridle-path that wound in and out among the foothills, which gradually grew higher and higher. Not a living creature did he meet with—not a goat, not so much as a bird. He began to feel curiously drowsy, as if he were riding in a dream.
Suddenly his consciousness seemed to have gone out of gear, to have missed one of the notches in time or space, for he found himself riding along a high-road, in the midst of a crowd of peasants in holiday attire. Nor did this surprise him—his passive uncritical mood was impervious to surprise.
And yet ... what were these people with whom he had mingled? An ordinary troop of holiday-making peasants? At first sight, so they seemed. There were pretty girls, with sunny hair escaping from under red and blue handkerchiefs, and rustic dandies cross-gartered with gay ribands, and old women with quiet, nobly-lined faces—a village community bound for some fair or merry-making.
But why were their eyes so fixed and strange, and why did they walk in absolute silence?
And then the invisible cicerone of dreams, who is one's other self, whispered in his ear, These are they whom men call dead.
And, like everything else said by that cicerone, these words seemed to throw a flood of light on the situation, to make it immediately normal, even prosaic.