The shadows deepened.

“I have twice seen Injuns passing from tree to tree and hiding.  Why are they there?  There—­look!”

A sinewy form in the shadows of the pines appeared and disappeared.  Gretchen saw it.

“They mean evil, or they would not hide.  Gretchen, what shall we do?”

Mrs. Woods closed the door and barred it, took down the rifle from the side of the room, and looked out through a crevice in the split shutter.

There was a silence for a time; then Mrs. Woods moved and said:  “They are coming toward the house, passing from one tree to another.  They mean revenge—­I feel it—­revenge on me, and Benjamin—­he is the leader of it.”

The flitting of shadowy forms among the pines grew alarming.  Nearer and nearer they came, and more and more excited became Mrs. Woods’s apprehensions.  Gretchen began to cry, through nervous excitement, and with the first rush of tears came to her, as usual, the thought of her violin.

She took up the instrument, tuned it with nervous fingers, and drew the bow across the strings, making them shriek as with pain, and then drifted into the air the music of the Traumerei.

“Fiddling, Gretchen—­fiddling in the shadow of death?  I don’t know but what you are right—­that tune, too!”

The music trembled; the haunting strain quivered, rose and descended, and was repeated over and over again.

“There is no movement in the pines,” said Mrs. Woods.  “It is growing darker.  Play on.  It does seem as though that strain was stolen from heaven to overcome evil with.”

Gretchen played.  An hour passed, and the moon rose.  Then she laid down the violin and listened.

“Oh, Gretchen, he is coming!  I know that form.  It is Benjamin.  He is coming alone.  What shall we do?  He is—­right before the door!”

Gretchen’s eye fell upon the musical glasses, which were among the few things that she had brought from the East and which had belonged to her old German home.  She had tuned them early in the evening by pouring water into them, as she had been taught to do in her old German village, and she wet her fingers and touched them to the tender forest hymn: 

    “Now the woods are all sleeping.”

“He has stopped,” said Mrs. Woods.  “He is listening—­play.”

The music filled the cabin.  No tones can equal in sweetness the musical glasses, and the trembling nerves of Gretchen’s fingers gave a spirit of pathetic pleading to the old German forest hymn.  Over and over again she played the air, waiting for the word of Mrs. Woods to cease.

“He is going,” said Mrs. Woods, slowly.  “He is moving back toward the pines.  He has changed his mind, or has gone for his band.  You may stop now.”

Mrs. Woods watched by the split shutter until past midnight.  Then she laid down on the bed, and Gretchen watched, and one listened while the other slept, by turns, during the night.  But no footstep was heard.  The midsummer sun blazed over the pines in the early morning; birds sang gayly in the dewy air, and Gretchen prepared the morning meal as usual, then made her way to the log school-house.