Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/90

72 of South Carolina raising troops. Horseshoe conducted him by a circuitous route to the house of Wat Adair, a well-known mountaineer, whose good will they wished to obtain. But Adair gave the travelers away to the Tories in spite of the efforts of Mary Musgrove, a mountain girl, to warn Butler. Adair accompanied Horseshoe and Butler on their departure, in order to show them the road.]

Meantime Butler and Robinson advanced at a wearied pace. The twilight had so far faded as to be only discernible on the western sky. The stars were twinkling through the leaves of the forest, and the light of the firefly spangled the wilderness. The road might be descried, in the most open parts of the wood, for some fifty paces ahead; but where the shrubbery was more dense, it was lost in utter darkness. Our travelers, like most wayfarers towards the end of the day, rode silently along, seldom exchanging a word and anxiously computing the distance which they had yet to traverse before they reached their appointed place of repose. A sense of danger, and the necessity for vigilance, on the present occasion, made them the more silent.

"I thought I heard a wild sort of yell just now—people laughing a great way off," said Robinson, "but there's such a hooting of owls and piping of frogs that I mought have been mistaken. Halt, major. Let me listen—there it is again."

"It is the crying of a panther, sergeant; more than a mile from us, by my ear."

"It is mightily like the scream of drunken men," replied the sergeant; "and there, too! I thought I heard the clatter of a hoof."

The travelers again reined up and listened.