"Ah! Jack! Jack! To start so well and end so miserably, I can't bear it--I can't stay here. You stay and let me go." "No, Dick, it can't be; you are already so worn out that we should have been obliged to halt for you if Jones hadn't broken down. It can't be that you would think of leaving a fellow-soldier in such extremity as this, Dick? I know you better." "But I don't know him. I have no interest in him. With you I'll face any danger--I'll die without a word; but to stay here in this awful place, with the black pools of water, like great dead eyes, glaring in their hideous light" (the pine-torch flaring in the wind filled the glade with vast ogreish shadows, as the clustering bushes were swayed in the night air) "and these hideous night-cries--O Jack, I can't--I can't--I must go!" "But the horses and the need of some one that can come back in case anything befalls me. I am disappointed in you, Dick. I am shocked; you are not the man of courage and honor I thought you." "O my God, go--go--I will stay; but, Jack, if you find me dead, tell--tell--Rosa--that--that--" He gasped and sank down sobbing against the gnarled tree that crossed the mound above Jones's head. "I will tell Rosa that you were the man she believed you were when the trial came," and with this Jack and Barney, with a flaming torch, set forward hastily through the fantastic curtain of foliage and night, which shut in the glimmering vista of specters, dark, sinister, and menacing. CHAPTER XXV PHANTASMAGORIA. To say that night is a time of terror is a commonplace. Night is not terrible of itself. It is like the ocean--peace and repose if there be no storm. But of all terrors there are none, outside a guilty mind, so benumbing as night in the unknown. It does not lessen the horror of darkness that fear makes use of the imagination for its agencies. Fancy, intuition, and the train that follows the inner vision, these make of night a phantasmagoria, compared to which Milton's inferno is a place of comparative repose.