“A heart!” he cried. “What's that? A piece of flesh that breeds endless woes in bosoms such as yours. All men's should be of stone--as mine is now!” He paused, then said abruptly: “Up with you and follow me. I neither pity nor sympathize; but for the sake of her who bore me, I will give you such shelter as I have.” He picked up the boy, who, knowing him, had sat stupefied with fear, and bade the woman follow him. “But the horse?” she said, hesitating. “Leave it,” he replied. “The brute is the best among you, but whither we go no horse may follow.” He turned, taking up the boy in his arms, and she dumbly followed him, trembling, faint, yet nerved by her fears to unusual exertion. So rapid was his gait, encumbered though he was, that she kept him in view with difficulty. Through the gloom she could divine the perils that environed their ever upward way. The grinding of stricken trees, the brawl of swollen waters harrowed her nerves not less than the partial gleams of unmeasured heights and depths revealed by the lightning. A sense of helplessness exaggerated these terrors among the unknown possibilities surrounding her. It seemed as though they would never stop again. Her limbs trembled, her heart thumped suffocatingly, yet their guide gave no heed, but pressed on as though no shivering woman pantingly dogged his steps. They traveled thus for several miles. She felt herself giving way totally when, on looking up once more, she saw that the hunter had vanished. “Where am I?” she cried, and a voice, issuing seemingly out of the mountain-side, bade her come on. Her hands struck a wall of rock; on her right a precipice yawned; so, groping toward the left, she felt as she advanced that she was leaving the outer air; the wind and rain no longer beat upon her, yet the darkness was intense. She heard the voice of the boy calling upon her to keep near. Into the bowels of the mountains she felt her way until a gleam of light shone ahead. She hastened forward round a shoulder of rock into a roomy aperture branching from the main cavern. The boy lay upon a pallet of skins, while Herne the Hunter fixed the flaring pine-knot he had lighted into a crevice of the rock. Then he started a fire, drew out of another crevice some cold cooked meat and filled a gourd with water from a spring that trickled out at one end of the cave. “Eat,” he said, waving his hand. “Eat--that ye may not die. The more unfit to live, the less prepared for death. Eat!” With that he turned away and busied himself in bathing and bandaging the boy's foot, which, though not severely sprained, was for the time quite painful. Mrs. Renfro now threw back the hood of her waterproof and laid the cloak aside. Even old Herne--women hater that he was--could not have found fault with the matronly beauty of her face, unless with its expression of self-satisfied worldliness, as of one who judged others and herself solely by conventional standards, shaped largely by flattery and conceit.