“Two or three other officers have been by here ridin’ hosses,” he said in the voice of an equal speaking to his equal, “an’ they don’t fill me plum’ full o’ envy a-tall, a-tall. I guess a feller tonight kin keep warmer walkin’ on the ground than ridin’ on a hoss. What might your name be, Mr. Officer?”
“Kenton. I’m a lieutenant, at present on the staff of General Jackson. What is yours?”
“Seth Moore, an’ I’m always a private, but at present doin’ sentinel duty, but wishin’ I was at home in our double log house ‘tween the blankets.”
“Have you noticed anything, Seth?” asked Harry, not at all offended by the nature of his reply.
“I’ve seen some snow, an’ now an’ then the cold top of a mountain, an’-”
“An’ what, Seth?”
“Do you see that grove straight toward the north four or five hundred yards away?”
“Yes, but I can make nothing of it but a black blur. It’s too far away to tell the trunks of the trees apart.”
“It’s too fur fur me, too, an’ my eyes are good, but ten or fifteen minutes ago, leftenant, I thought I saw a shadder at the edge of the grove. It ‘peared to me that the shadder was like that of a horse with a man on it. After a while it went back among the trees an’ o’ course I lost it thar.”
“You feel quite sure you saw the shadow, Seth?”
“Yes, leftenant. I’m shore I ain’t mistook. I’ve hunted ‘coons an’ ‘possums at night too much to be mistook about shadders. I reckon, if I may say so, shadders is my specialty, me bein’ somethin’ o’ a night owl. As shore as I’m standin’ here, leftenant, and as shore as you’re settin’ there on your hoss, a mounted man come to the edge of that wood an’ stayed thar a while, watchin’ us. I’d have follered him, but I couldn’t leave my beat here, an’ you’re the first officer I’ve saw since. It may amount to nothin, an’ then again it mayn’t.”
“I’m glad you told me. I’ll go into the grove myself and see if anybody is there now.”
“Leftenant, if I was you I’d be mighty keerful. If it’s a spy it’ll be easy enough for him under the cover of the trees to shoot you in the open comin’ toward him.”
Harry knew that Jackson planned a surprise of some kind and Seth Moore’s words about the mounted man alarmed him. He did not doubt the accuracy of the young mountaineer’s eyesight, or his coolness, and he resolved that he would not go back to headquarters until he knew more about that “shadow.” But Moore’s advice about caution was not to be unheeded.
“If you keep in the edge of our woods here,” said Moore, “an’ ride along a piece you’ll come to a little valley. Then you kin go up that an’ come into the grove over thar without being seed.”
“Good advice. I’ll take it.”
Harry loosened one of the pistols in his belt and rode cautiously through the wood as Seth Moore had suggested. The ground sloped rapidly, and soon he reached the narrow but deep little valley with a dense growth of trees and underbrush on either side. The valley led upward, and he came into the grove just as Moore had predicted.
This forest was of much wider extent than he had supposed. It stretched northward further than he could see, and, although it was devoid of undergrowth, it was very dark among the trees. He rode his horse behind the trunk of a great oak, and, pausing there, examined all the forest within eyeshot.
He saw nothing but the long rows of tree trunks, white on the northern side with snow, and he heard nothing but the cold rustle of wind among boughs bare of branches. Yet he had full confidence in the words of Seth Moore. He could neither see him nor hear him, but he was sure that somebody besides himself was in the wood. Once more the soul and spirit of his great ancestor were poured into him, and for the moment he, too, was the wilderness rover, endowed with nerves preternaturally acute.