As he drew erect and clasped the upper part of his tunic, I saw that around his body was a sort of sash of green cloth wrapped several times, and stuck through the folds of it, various tools of the cruder sort of silversmiths. Also, though his figure was young, the skin of his face was drawn in fine wrinkles. He had a thin, high nose with a slightly mobile tip that seemed to twitch a little with distrust as he looked at me. The mouth below it was full and curved, his eyes bluish black, opaque and velvet-looking; windows out of which came and looked boldness, cunning and power, and the wistfulness of the wild creature questioning its kinship with man. All this without so much as altering a muscle of his face or removing his gaze from mine. Then he stepped back a pace against the yielding boughs, which seemed to give like doors, and received him without crackling or sensible displacement into the silence of the wood.
II
I MEET THE OUTLIERS IN THE WOOD AND HERMAN COMES TO FIND ME
When Herman got my letter concerning the dark man under the bay tree, he was wholly at loss what to make of it. He was quite habituated to my method of making believe to be a story before writing it, and was always willing to play up to his part as soon as he learned what that was, but in this case I had neglected to tell him. While he was reading the letter over, it occurred to him the whole thing might be merely a childish pique because he had scoffed at my wood people in the first place, and was rather annoyed at it.
But as often as he went back to the letter he found a note of conviction in it—for I had written it immediately after the adventure—that overrode both of these interpretations.
After that he was divided between the fear that I really had been overworking and a period of mild hallucination had set in, or the possibility that I could have met some sort of wild person in the forest who might do me an injury. The most disturbing thing in the letter was the declaration that I meant to go back as soon as I could and find out all about the woodlander. The result of all this was that after having written me a separate letter based on each one of these beliefs, and having destroyed it, Herman left the University Friday morning and came down to find out, if possible, what really had occurred.
He arrived on the stage that reaches Fairshore at half-past one, and as he had come directly from his lecture room, he had first to have lunch and change to his out-of-door clothes. This made it the middle of the afternoon before he reached the cottage. As soon as he had a glimpse of it, he experienced a sinking of the heart that warned him that I was not there. However, he went through the formality of knocking at the front door before going round to see if I had left the key, as I did for short absences, or had taken it to the Inn as when I meant to be away several days. He found the key in the accustomed place, and something more alarming. Inside the screened porch at the back were the three little bottles of milk which the milkman had left there each evening that I had been away. So I had been gone three days!
The first thing was to make sure that I was not at Mira Monte or at Idlewild, where I went sometimes as the mood demanded. He was very cautious about making inquiries at the post-office and the Inn, for, of course, I hadn’t given Herman any right to be interested in my whereabouts. And, of course, if I really had gone off to hunt for hypothetical people in the woods, I shouldn’t want it talked about. At the end of an hour he had learned nothing more definite than that if I had gone out of town it had not been by the regular stages, and nobody knew when or where.
He decided then that the occasion justified his going into the house to find out if I had taken my suit-case, or anything that would give a clue. By the time he got back to the cottage it was past four o’clock, and the milkman had been his round. There were now four little bottles on the ledge. This somehow seemed to Herman so alarming a circumstance, with its implication of unexpected detention, that with scarcely more than a glance about the house, he put some crackers and my traveling flask into his pocket and set out almost running for Broken Tree.
He said that he found the place with very little difficulty, and without noticing particularly the way he came. I have thought since it might be one of the conditions of going there, that you must be thinking altogether of other matters and be concerned in the going for something more than yourself.
Herman found the trail and followed it as far as the place of the faggot, and on to the point where I had seen the tall man washing his hair at the spring. Though he could have had no reasonable expectation he had unconsciously counted on finding some trace of me in that neighborhood, and, disappointed in that, was at loss what to do. The trail, which ran out indistinguishably in the meadow, began again on the other side. After losing half an hour in picking it up again, he came on half fearfully, anticipating he knew not what dread evidence at every turn.