And so he was strengthened to put his foot in the stirrup and ride away, with the sheriff at his right hand, and the other men close behind, all looking alertly forward into the gloom. The roan horse, fresh from slumber, was beginning to feel his hay and corn, snuffing the quickening wind, pulling on the bit, and forging on at a more speedy gait. The other men noticed this, for now and again, with a touch of the spur, they closed up, and the roan horse was in the centre of the squad. VII. As they went, the deputy sheriff's manner was little characterized by an official decorum. He seemed rather some bold roisterer who himself might have had ample cause to dread the law that he was sworn to administer. The rough humor of his sallies affected Espey as an incongruous sort of fun, taken in connection with his interpretation of their errand, and his recollection of the keen, sinister, thin face, with its piercing dark eyes, and its sharp hooked nose, and the straight, menacing eyebrows meeting above it. He had this mental vision distinctly before his contemplation, as it had impressed him in the flicker of Mrs. Larrabee's tallow dip, instead of the undistinguishable equestrian shadow that in the black night pressed close to his horse's flank, and now and again laid a sinewy hand upon his arm. For the officer, in a spirit of mock confidence, was detailing, much to that worthy's discomfort, the spectral fears of his friend from "the t'other e-end of the county," a believer in ghosts, and making an elaborate pretense of sharing them. Now and again, with a sepulchral voice and an agitated manner, he would conjure Espey to say if he saw nothing flickering, waving white, in some open stretch of the road that lay vacant and vaguely glimmering in the starlight before them. Then, hardly waiting for an answer, he would burst into a whoop of derisive laughter, startling the solemn silence of the night-bound mountain wilderness, and rousing strange echoes of weird mirth from rock and ravine. More than once the uncanny tumult of these wild, insensate cries moved the staid comrades of the deputy sheriff to remonstrance. In the distance and the night and their repetitiousness, the sounds seemed curiously unrelated to those that had evoked them. "That ain't no rocks a-answerin' back," said the man from the Gap. "I b'lieve somebody is a-hollerin' at ye."