A point of red light had sprung up in the vague glooms. A will-o’-the-wisp?--some wavering “ghost’s candle” to light him to his grave. With his accurate knowledge of the locality he sought to place it. The distant gleam seemed to shine from a window of the old hotel, and this bespoke the arrival of rude occupants. He heard a wild halloo, a snatch of song perhaps--or was it fancy? And were the iterative echoes in the gorge the fancy of the stern old crags? For the first time since he returned, maimed and helpless, and a non-combatant, were the lawless marauders quartered at the old hotel. He stood for a while gazing at it with dilated eyes. Then he silently stepped within the cabin and barred the door with his uncertain and awkward left hand. The cheerful interior of the house was all aglow. The fire had been mended, and yellow flames were undulating about the logs with many a gleaming line of grace. Blue and purple and scarlet flashes they showed in fugitive iridescence. They illumined his face, and his mother noted its pallor--the deep pallor which he had brought from the hospital. “Ye hev got yer fancies ag’in,” she cried. Then with anxious curiosity, “Whar be yer right hand now, Hil’ry?” She alluded to that cruel hallucination of sensation in an amputated arm. “Whar it oughter be,” he groaned; “on the trigger o’ my carbine.” His grief was not only that his arm was gone. It was to recognize the fact that his heart no longer beat exultantly at the mere prospect of conflict. And he was anguished with the poignant despair of a helpless man who has once been foremost in the fight. The next day he was moody and morose, and brooded silently over the fire. The doors were closed, for winter had come at last. The hoar frost whitened the great gaunt limbs of the trees, and lay in every curled dead leaf on the ground, and followed the zigzag lines of the fence, and embossed the fodder stack and the ash-hopper and the roofs with fantastic incongruities in silver tracery. The sun did not shine, the clouds dropped lower and lower still, a wind sprung up, and presently the snow was flying. The widow esteemed this as in the nature of a special providence, since the dizzying whirl of white flakes veiled the little cabin and its humble surroundings from the observation of the free-booting tenants of the old hotel across the gorge. “It air powerful selfish, I know, ter hope the bushwhackers will forage on somebody else’s poultry an’ sech, but somehows my own chickens seem nigher kin ter me than other folkses’ be. I never see no sech ten-toed chickens ez mine nowhar.”