The sentinel had left the discussion, and reverted to the window; he beckoned to one of the other mountaineers presently, and pointed down the long avenue of the great oaks. Here and there were broad open spaces, where the moonlight fell in unbroken effulgence; the autumn winds had left the trees but scantily leaved; bough and bole were often distinct through the foliage, and even amidst the shadows, which duplicated each leaf and twig; the white frost lent an accentuation of brilliancy. Upon the sere grass a hoofbeat was falling, and an equestrian figure rode into full view; a mounted shadow beside him now lurked among the trees; now skulked strangely foreshortened, on the ground; now rose suddenly upon the vertical surface of a crag into the full stature of a man and the complete equipment of a horse, with a definiteness that had an uncanny effect, somehow, in the solitude. So brilliant was the moon that it seemed to seek out and reveal vague, spectral, half-realized things, affinities of the night and the unknown. “Edzac’ly,—jes’ ez I said. Teck ridin’ ’long like some great captain,” exclaimed Bassett, whom the faint jingle of spurs in the frosty air had brought to the window. The mounted figure passed close to the building, never lifting his head nor making a sign, although he must have been conscious of the men looking down at him. The horse whickered gleefully upon nearing the barn, and the rocks echoed and reëchoed the sound, until it simulated the distant, neighing of a squadron of cavalry. Even when it had sunk to silence, some seeming charger far away again broke the quiet, neighing in the solitary defiles of the mountain. The men looked at one another; here and there a spark of irritation, perceptible the moment that the horseman had first been glimpsed through the aisles of the woods, began to flare definitely into anger. “Teck ain’t keerin’ how much n’ise he lets them men hear.” “He don’t mind sech ez we-uns say; he air jes’ sot an’ sodden in his own way.” “He oughter be tuk down somehow. He air too robustious an’ domineerin’ ter live.”