Now and then we looked back at it, but we feared it
not.
As for me, I had begun to think that a panther might be the least
formidable thing I should meet that night. By this I had scarcely
any hope - or fear - that I should find her at our journey's end. The
lonesome path that led only to the night-time forest, the deep and
dark river with its mournful voice, the hard, bright, pitiless stars,
the cold, the loneliness, the distance, - how should she be there?
And if not she, who then?
The hut to which I had been directed stood in an angle made by the
neck and the main bank of the river. On one side of it was the
water, on the other a deep wood. The place had an evil name, and
no man had lived there since the planter who had built it hanged
himself upon its threshold. The hut was ruinous: in the summer tall
weeds grew up around it, and venomous snakes harbored beneath
its rotted and broken floor; in the winter the snow whitened it, and
the wild fowl flew screaming in and out of the open door and the
windows that needed no barring. To-night the door was shut and
the windows in some way obscured. But the interstices between
the logs showed red; the hut was lighted within, and some one was
keeping tryst.
The stillness was deadly. It was not silence, for the river murmured
in the stiff reeds, and far off in the midnight forest some beast of
the night uttered its cry, but a hush, a holding of the breath, an
expectant horror.
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