And when, as in sudden enchantment, darkness became light and night developed into dawn, when color renewed the landscape, and the dull sky grew red as if flushed with sudden triumph, and the black mountains turned royally purple in the distance and tenderly green nearer at hand, and the waters of the river leaped and flashed like a live thing, as with an actual joy in existence, and the great fiery sun, full of vital yellow flame, flared up over the eastern horizon, the squadron, with jingling spurs and clanking sabers, with carbines and canteens rattling, with the trumpet now and again sending forth those elated, joyous martial strains, so sweet and yet so proud, rode forth into a new day, and Hilary Knox, among the troopers and gallantly mounted, rode forth into a new life. The bivouac fires glowed for a while, then fell to smoldering and died, leaving but a gray ash to tell of their presence here. Day by day the eagles in the great bare pine tree on the high rock at the summit of the mountain looked for Hilary to visit his point of observation and stir their hearts with fear and wrath. Time and again the male bird might have been seen to circle about at the usual hour for the boy’s coming; first with apprehension lest his absence was too good to be true, then, with the courage of immunity undisciplined by fear, screaming and flouncing as if to challenge this apparition of quondam terror. Now and then the pair seemed to argue and collogue together upon the mystery of his non-appearance, and to chuffily compare notes, and seek to classify their impressions of this singular specimen of the animal kingdom. Perhaps, tabulated, their conclusions might stand thus: Genus, boy; habits, noisy; diet, omnivorous; element, mischief; uses, undiscovered and undiscoverable. Long, long after the eagles had forgotten the intruder, after their brood, the two ill-feathered nestlings, had taken strongly to wing, after their nest, a mass of loose, but well collocated sticks and grass, had given way to the beat of the rain and the blasts of the wind, did Hilary’s mother wearily gaze from the heights where the mountain cabin was perched down upon the curves of the valley road along which she had seen him riding away with that glittering train, and sigh and let her knitting fall from her nerveless hands, and wonder what would the manner of his home-coming be, or whether the future held at all a home-coming for him. And her many sighs kept her heart sick and turned her hair very white. CHAPTER II