Its current was placid enough when the train was safely on the other side at a stand-still, and the people from the little log-cabin below climbed the embankment to hear the cause of the unprecedented stoppage. The bridge did not break on this occasion, but the old man is very sure they cannot do this “fool trick” again. Although the train waited for a time while the banks of the river were patrolled, it was gone clanging on its way long before the rocks had ceased to echo the tramp of excited horsemen and their hoarse cries, as they beat the bushes in the neighboring woods, for the whole country-side was roused. The opinion that the reckless young mountaineer had, in leaping into the river, struck against some floating log, and had been killed by the concussion, or had gone to the bottom among the bowlders with a fatal force, gained ground as the day gradually dawned and no trace of him was detected. By degrees the search degenerated into the idler phases of morbid curiosity. Many people visited the spot, ostensibly to join in the effort, who stared at the bridge and speculated on its height, and strolled up and down the banks, wondering futilely. Even when the sunset was reddening the river; when the evening star was tangled in the boughs of a white pine on the bank; when the sound of lowing kine was mellow on the air; when the bridge doffed its massive aspect, and became illusory, a shadow not more material than its shadow in the current below,—footing for the moonbeams, lodgment for the dew, a perch for a belated bird, familiar of the mist,—vague figures still lingered about the water-side, and raucous voices grated on the evening air. But at last the darkness slipped down; the train came and went; silence fell upon the river, save for its own meditative, iterative voice, the croaking of frogs, and the exquisite melody of the mocking-bird, as he sang in the slant of the moonbeams glistening through fringes of the pines. A wind rose and died away. The night was inexpressibly solitary. Far off a dog howled. The constellations imperceptibly tended westward. And presently, in the dark loneliness of the dead hour, something,—an otter, a musk-rat, a mink?—some stealthy wild thing, stirred itself at the water’s edge, beneath a broad ledge of the jagged, beetling rocks along the bank, under the current, on the gravelly shallows. It made much commotion; the water receded in widening circles far out toward the middle of the river,—a scramble, a stroke or two, and it rose to its full height, and waded to the shore; for it was the battered image of a man. He wore no hat; his long locks hung in straight wisps down upon his shoulders. He glanced about him continually with fearful eyes, as he hobbled stiffly up the bank. Once he sat down on the roots of a tree in the shadow, and essayed to draw off the great boots, heavy with water, and hampering his every motion. But the leather, so long steeped, had swelled, and he could not divest himself of them.