“Do not name him!” he cried fiercely; then abruptly lowering his tone, he said, with infinite sadness: “Ask me no more. Yonder, by that white cliff, lies the Swananoa trail you missed yesterday. The kindest thing you can do is to forget that you have seen me. Farewell!”
He turned away and swung himself down the mountain-side into the Dismal. She saw the rolling mists close over him, and remained motionless in a reverie so deep that the boy spoke twice to her before she turned her horse’s head and followed him.
* * * * *
Above the surveyor’s camp lay the Swananoa Gap, a gloomy, precipitous gorge through which the river lashed itself into milder reaches below. Mrs. Renfro found her husband absent. With a single assistant he had started for the upper defiles, intending to be gone several days. They told her that he would endeavor to secure the services of Herne the Hunter as a guide, as one knowing more of that wilderness than any one else.
Here was fresh food for wifely alarm. Herne had never met her husband, yet the latter’s name would make known his relationship to herself. She shuddered over the possibilities that might result from their sojourn together—far from aid—in those wild mountains, and made herself wretched for a week in consequence.
Meanwhile the transient fine weather passed; the rains once more descended, and the peaks of Nantahalah were invisible for days amid a whirl of vapor. The boom of the river, the grinding of forest limbs, the shriek of the wind, made life unusually dreary at the camp. She lay awake one night when the elements were apparently doing their worst. Her husband was still absent—perhaps alone with a possible maniac, raving over the memory of fancied wrongs.
Finally another sound mingled with and at last overmastered all others—something between a crash and a roar, interblended with sullen jars and grindings. Near and nearer it came. She sprang to the tent-floor and found her feet in the water. The darkness was intense. What could be the matter? Fear overcame her resolution and she shrieked aloud.
A man bearing a lantern burst into the tent with a hoarse cry. Its gleams showed her Herne the Hunter, drenched, draggled, a ghastly cut across his face, with the blood streaming down, his long hair flying, and in his eyes a fierce flame.
“I feared I would not find you,” he shouted, for the roar without was now appalling. “It is a cloud-burst above. In five minutes this hollow will be fathoms deep. The tents lower down are already gone. Come!”
He had seized and was bearing her out.