from the savage, from the wild beast and the pestilence.  Southward, and a long way off, lay the great Cypress Swamp.  The wavering sable line of its tree-tops spread a pall across the starless horizon.  The deadly white mists which shrouded its gloomy mystery through the sunniest day were now creeping out to enshroud the higher land.  Through the mingled mist and darkness the sombre trunks of the towering cypress trees rose with supernatural blackness.  The mysterious “knees,” those strange, naked, blackened roots, so wildly gnarled and twisted about the foot of the cypress, appeared to writhe out of the swamp’s awful dimness like monstrous serpents seen in a dreadful dream.

And thus these dark fancies swayed the boy’s imagination as wind sways flame, till he suddenly remembered and turned from them more quickly and firmly than ever before.  He had made up his mind to cease dreaming with his eyes open.  He was resolved to see only real sights and to hear only real sounds from this time on.  He did not deceive himself by thinking that this ever could be easy for him to do.  He knew too well that in place of the cool, steady common-sense which should dwell in every man’s breast, there dwelt something strangely hot and restless in his own.  He had always felt this difference without understanding it; but he had hoped that no one else knew it—­up to the cruel revelation of Ruth’s laughing and kindly meant words.  Well, neither Ruth nor any one should ever again have cause to laugh at him for romantic weakness, if he might help it by keeping guard over his fancy.

He therefore sternly kept his eyes away from the swamp where mystery always brooded.  He would not look at the wonderful mound near the swamp, which he never before had passed without wonder.  It was then—­as it is now—­such an amazing monument to a vanished race.  It is so unaccountably placed, this mountain of earth in the midst of level lowlands; so astounding in size and so unmistakably the work of unknown human hands.  Never till that night had David’s fervid imagination turned toward it without his beginning forthwith to wonder over the secrets of the ages which lie buried beneath.  He had hitherto always thought of this mound in association with the mysterious blazed trail through the forest.  But that was much farther off and more directly south, and no one but the boy had ever found any connection between the two.  He, dreaming, would sometimes imagine that the same vanished race had marked the path through the forest by cutting the trees on either side—­this marvellous blazed trail which De Soto is sometimes said to have found when he came, and again to have made himself, regardless of the fact that history does not mention his being anywhere near.  The romance of the buried treasure which this mystic path was believed to lead to, perpetually held David under a spell of enchantment.  But he would not allow himself to linger over these mysteries now.  He also resisted the horrible fascination of the Dismal Slough—­that long, frightful black pit—­linking the swamp to the river.  And most of all he shrunk from giving a thought or a glance toward the gloom hanging over Duff’s Fort, which was still farther off, and the strongest, most bloody link in the long and unbroken chain of crime then stretching clear across southwestern Kentucky.