“Why, the hoss-captain’s varmints, to be sure; or what-all the abomination o’ desolation has left of ’em.  We ain’t more than a cat’s jump from the edge o’ the big rock where we first sot eyes on ’em this morning.”

I saw not what was to be gained by any such long-range espial in the darkness.  None the less, I followed the old man to the cliff’s edge.  He was wiser in his forecastings than I was in mine.  There was a thing to look at, and light enough to see it by.  One of the missile stones, it seems, had crashed into the great fire, scattering the brands in all directions.  The pine-bough troop shelters were ablaze, and creeping serpents of fire were worming their way hither and yon over the year-old leaf beds in the wood.  Ever and anon some pine sapling in the path of these fiery serpents would go up in a torch-like flare; and so, as I say, there was light enough.

What we looked down upon was not inaptly pictured out by Ephraim Yeates’s Scripture phrase, the abomination of desolation.  Every vestige of the camp save the glowing skeletons of the troop shelters had disappeared, and the swarded savanna was become a blackened chaos-blot on the fair woodland scene.  I have said that the powder-sheltering boulder was a cliff for size; the mighty upheaval of the explosion had toppled it in ruins into the stream, and huge fragments the bigness of a wine-butt had been hurled with the storm of lighter debris broadcast upon the camp.

At first we saw no sign of life in all the firelit space.  But a moment later, when three or four of the sapling torches blazed up together, we made out some half dozen figures of human beings—­whether red or white we could not tell—­stumbling and reeling about among the rocks like blind men drunken.

At sight of these the old hunter doffed his cap and fell upon his knees with hands uplifted to pour out his zealot’s soul in the awful sentences of the Psalmist’s imprecation.

“’Let God arise, and let His inimies be scattered; let them also that hate Him flee before Him.  Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away; and like as the wax melteth at the fire, so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God....’”

XXXI

IN WHICH WE MAKE A FORCED MARCH

It could have been but little short of midnight when we came down into the Great Trace near the ambush ground where we had set our trap for the peace men.

The night had cleared most beautifully, and overhead the stars were burning like points of white fire in the black dome of the heavens.  As often happens after a shower, the night shrillings of the forest were in fullest tide; and a whip-will’s-widow, disturbed by our approach, fluttered to a higher perch and set up his plaintive protest.

At our turning eastward on the trace, the old hunter massed our little company as compactly as the path allowed, and giving us the word to follow cautiously, tossed his bridle rein to the Catawba and went on ahead to feel out the way.