"A maid, alone and pure, I stand, not upon water nor on land; I hold a mirror in my hand, in which to see what Fate may send...." She broke off and screamed. Lanark whipped around. The girl stood, misty-pale in the wash of moonlight, all crouched and curved together like a bow. "It was coming!" she quavered. "I saw it in the mirror--over yonder, among those trees----" Lanark glared across the little strip of water and the moonlit grass beyond. Ten paces away, between two trunks, something shone in the shadows--shone darkly, like tar, though the filtered moon-rays did not touch it. He saw nothing of the shape, save that it moved and lived--and watched. He drew his revolver and fired, twice. There was a crash of twigs, as though something had flinched backward at the reports. Lanark splashed through the water and, despite his limp, charged at the place where the presence lurked. _12. Jager_ It had been some minutes before eleven o'clock when Jager reined in his old black horse at a distance of two miles from Fearful Rock. Most of those now alive who knew Jager personally are apt to describe him as he was when they were young and he was old--a burly graybeard, a notable preacher and exhorter, particularly at funerals. He preferred the New Testament to the Old, though he was apt to misquote his texts from either; and he loved children, and once preached a telling sermon against the proposition of infant damnation. His tombstone, at Fort Smith, Arkansas, bears as epitaph a verse from the third chapter of the first book of Samuel: _Here am I, for thou didst call me_. Jager when young is harder to study and to visualize. However, the diary of a long-dead farmer's wife of Pennsylvania records that the "Jager boy" was dull but serious at school, and that his appetite for mince pie amounted to a passion. In Topeka, Kansas, lives a retired railroad conductor whose father, on the pre-Rebellion frontier, once heard Jager defy Southern hoodlums to shoot him for voting Free-state in a territorial election. Ex-Major Kane Lanark mentioned Jager frequently and with admiration in the remarkable pen-and-ink memoir on which the present narrative is based. How he approached Fearful Rock, and what he encountered there, he himself often described verbally to such of his friends as pretended that they believed him. The moonlight showed him a stunted tree, with one gnarled root looping up out of the earth, and to that root he tethered his animal. Then, like Lanark, he threw off his coat, strapping it to the cantle of his saddle, and unfastened his "hickory" blue shirt at the throat. From a saddlebag he drew a trusty-looking revolver, its barrel sawed off. Turning its butt toward the moon, he spun the cylinder to make sure that it was loaded. Then he thrust it into his belt without benefit of holster, and started on foot toward the rock and its remains of a house.