That two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, which is the secret of soldierly success, comes only from companionship.  The night-wood is a world by itself, filled with its own atmosphere, as oppressive to valor as the electric reefs that drew the nails from the ships of Sindbad.  Among familiar scenes and well-known shapes, it is all the delight the poets sing—­so tranquillizing, inspiring, fecund, that in comparison the thought of day brings up garish hues, flaunting figures—­the hardness, harshness and unlovely in life.  But night in the goblin-land, where Dick found himself suddenly deserted, with fantastic forms swaying in the lazy wind, would have had terrors for the most constant mind; terrors such as filled the soul of MacBeth, when Birnam wood came marching to Dunsinane.  In an instant, as it seemed to Dick’s exalted and painfully impressionable sense, every separate leaf, branch, brier, copse, and jungle, was endowed with a voice of its own—­hateful, irritating, mocking.  Swarms of peering eyes hovered in the air, glowering uncanny menace into the boy’s wild, dilating vision.

Brave, even to recklessness, Dick was, as you have seen; but no sooner had the glimmer of Jack’s torch flickered and fluttered into the black distance, making place for the monstrous shapes, the luring shadows, and threatening forms encompassing him, than Dick threw himself, with a wailing shriek, into the morass in a wild attempt to follow.

In an instant he was up to his middle in mud and water.  He seized the prickly branches coiling about and above him; he gasped in prayerful pleading, the home teaching still strong in him; but there was no answer, save the crooning night-birds and the croaking frogs.  Slimy things touched his torn flesh; whirring birds shot past him, disturbed in their night perches.  The deadly odor, pungent and nauseous, of a thousand exhaling herbs, filled his nostrils.  The darkness grew, instinct with threatening forms.  He gasped, struggled, and in a fervent outburst of thanksgiving regained the dank mound.  Ah, there was life on that! human life.  Jones slept, the stertorous sleep of delirium.  He murmured brokenly.  Dick was too terrified to distinguish what he said.  The blaze of the pine knot flared from side to side as the sighing breeze arose from the brackish pools, protesting the vitality of even this moribund hades.  Ah! if he could but lie down and bury his face.  The horses?  They were feeding tranquilly yonder, standing up to their knees in mosses and water.  The lines that tied them were long.  They could move about.  This was some comfort.  They were more human than the dreadful specters that filled the place.