After half an hour's fast walking, the two Unionists had cut across the long horseshoe around which the Rebels were traveling, and had come down much ahead of them on the other side of the mountain, and just where the road led up the steep ascent of another mountain.
There was a loneliness about the spot that was terrible. Over it hung the “thought and deadly feel of solitude.” The only break for miles in the primeval forest was that made for the narrow road. House or cabin there was none in all the gloomy reaches of rocks and gnarled trees. It was too inhospitable a region to tempt even the wildest squatter.
The flood of moonlight made the desolation more oppresive than ever, by making palpable and suggestive the inky abysses under the trees and in the thickets.
Fortner looked up the road to his right and listened intently.
A waterfall mumbled somewhere in the neighborhood. The pines and hemlocks near the summit sighed drearily. A gray fox, which had probably just supped off a pheasant, sat on a log and barked out his gluttonous satisfaction. A wildcat, as yet superless, screamed its envy from a cliff a half a mile away.
“I can't heah anything of Aunt Debby an' the others,” said Fortner, at length; “so I reckon they're clean over the mounting, an' bout safe by this time. Them beasts are purty good travelers, I imagine, an' they hain't let no grass grow in under the'r hufs.”
“But the Rebels are coming, hand over hand,” said Harry, who had been watching to the left and listening. “I hear them quite plainly. Yes, there they are,” he continued, as two or three galloped around a turn in the road, followed at a little interval by others.
The metallic clang of the rapid hoof-beats on the rocks rang through the somber aisles of the forest. Noisy fox and antiphonal wildcat stopped to listen to this invasion of sound.
“Quick! let's get in cover,” said Fortner.
“Ye make fur thet rock up thar,” said Fortner to Harry, pointing to a spot several hundred yards above them, “and stay thar tell I come. Keep close in the shadder, so's they won't see ye.”