"It is. Follow it. Do not let the coachman know that we are in pursuit. Follow it carefully, and at a proper distance." And the hackney coach followed the carriage of the unknown, until they passed from the shadows of the houses into the open country. Some four miles at least from the city hall, the carriage turned from one of the avenues, into a narrow lane, leading among the rocks, over a hill and down toward the North River. The colonel jumped from the box. "Wait for me here,--I'll not be long. Drive a little piece up the avenue, so that you will not be noticed, in case this carriage should return. Wait for me, I say,--for every hour I will give you ten dollars." With these words he hurried up the hill, in pursuit of the retreating carriage. The ground was frosted and broken,--huge rocks blocked up the path on either hand, and on the hill-top stood a clump of leafless trees. Pausing beneath these trees, the colonel endeavored to discern the carriage through the darkness, but in vain. But he heard the sound of the wheels as they rolled over the hard ground in the valley below. "It cannot go far. This lane terminates at the river, only two or three hundred yards away. Ah! I remember,--half-way between the hill and the river there is an old mansion which I noticed last summer, and which has not been occupied for years." The sound of the wheels suddenly ceased. The colonel drew the cord of his cloak about his neck, so as to permit his arms full play. Then from one pocket of his overcoat he drew forth a revolver, and from the other a bowie-knife. Grasping a weapon firmly in each hand, he stealthily descended the hill, and on tip-toe approached the carriage, which had indeed halted in front of the old mansion. The mansion, a strange and incongruous structure, built of stone, and brick, and wood, and enlarged from the original block house, which it had been two hundred years before, by the additions made by five or six generations, stood in a garden, apart from the road, its roofs swept by the leafless branches of gigantic forest-trees. In summer, quaint and incongruous as were the outlines of the huge edifice, it put on a beautiful look, for it was embowered in foliage, and its many roofs and walls of brick, and wood and stone, were hidden in a garment of vines and flowers. But now, in the blackness of this drear winter daybreak, it was black and desolate enough. Not a single light shed a cheerful ray, from any of the windows. Gliding behind the trunk of a sycamore, the colonel heard the voice of the unknown man, as he conducted the boy, Gulian, from the carriage along the garden walk toward the hall door. "Here you will be safe from all intrusion. I must return to the city at once, but I will be back early in the morning. Meanwhile, you can take a quiet sleep. You are not afraid to sleep in the old house, are you?" "Oh, no, no,--afraid of nothing but _his_ persecution," was the answer.