And last of all into this ancient woodland street of war one day there had
stepped a strange new-comer--the Anglo-Saxon. Fairhaired, blue-eyed, always
a lover of Land and of Woman and therefore of Home; in whose blood beat the
conquest of many a wilderness before this--the wilderness of Britain, the
wilderness of Normandy, the wildernesses of the Black, of the Hercinian
forest, the wilderness of the frosted marshes of the Elbe and the Rhine and
of the North Sea's wildest wandering foam and fury.
Here white lover and red lover had metand fought: with the same high spirit
and overstrung will, scorn of danger, greed of pain; the same vehemence of
hatred and excess of revenge; the same ideal of a hero as a young man who
stands in the thick of carnage calm and unconscious of his wounds or rushes
gladly to any poetic beauty of death that is terrible and sublime. And
already the red lover was gone and the fair-haired lover stood the quiet
owner of the road, the last of all its long train of conquerors brute and
human--with his cabin near by, his wife smiling beside the spinning-wheel,
his baby crowing on the threshold.
History was thicker here than along the Appian Way and it might well have
stirred O'Bannon; but he rode shamblingly on, un-touched, unmindful. At
every bend his eye quickly swept along the stretch of road to the next turn;
for every man carried the eye of an eagle in his head in those days.
At one point he pulled his horse up violently. A large buckeye tree stood on
the roadside a hundred yards ahead. Its large thick leaves already full at
this season, drew around the trunk a seamless robe of darkest green. But a
single slight rent had been made on one side as though a bough bad been
lately broken off to form an aperture commanding a view of the road; and
through this aperture he could see something black within-as black as a
crow's wing.
O'Bannon sent his horse forward in the slowest walk: it was unshod; the
stroke of its hoofs was muffled by the dust; and he had approached quite
close, remaining himself unobserved, before he recognized the school-master.
He was reclining against the trunk, his hat off, his eyes closed; in the
heavy shadows he looked white and sick and weak and troubled. Plainly he was
buried deep in his own thoughts. If he had broken off those low boughs in
order that he might obtain a view of the road, he had forgotten his own
purpose; if he had walked all the way out to this spot and was waiting, his
vigilance had grown lax, his aim slipped from him.