"A tame panther!" ejaculated Diccon. "It must be the one Nantauquas tamed, sir. He would have kept it somewhere near Master Rolfe's house."
"And it heard us, and followed us through the gate," I said. "It was the third the warder talked of."
We walked on, and the beast, addressing itself to motion, followed at our heels. Now and then we looked back at it, but we feared it not.
As for me, I had begun to think that a panther might be the least formidable thing I should meet that night. By this I had scarcely any hope--or fear--that I should find her at our journey's end. The lonesome path that led only to the night-time forest, the deep and dark river with its mournful voice, the hard, bright, pitiless stars, the cold, the loneliness, the distance,--how should she be there? And if not she, who then?
The hut to which I had been directed stood in an angle made by the neck and the main bank of the river. On one side of it was the water, on the other a deep wood. The place had an evil name, and no man had lived there since the planter who had built it hanged himself upon its threshold. The hut was ruinous: in the summer tall weeds grew up around it, and venomous snakes harbored beneath its rotted and broken floor; in the winter the snow whitened it, and the wild fowl flew screaming in and out of the open door and the windows that needed no barring. To-night the door was shut and the windows in some way obscured. But the interstices between the logs showed red; the hut was lighted within, and some one was keeping tryst.
The stillness was deadly. It was not silence, for the river murmured in the stiff reeds, and far off in the midnight forest some beast of the night uttered its cry, but a hush, a holding of the breath, an expectant horror. The door, warped and shrunken, was drawn to, but was not fastened, as I could tell by the unbroken line of red light down one side from top to bottom. Making no sound, I laid my hand upon it, pushed it open a little way, and looked within the hut.
I had thought to find it empty or to find it crowded. It was neither. A torch lit it, and on the hearth burned a fire. Drawn in front of the blaze was an old rude chair, and in it sat a slight figure draped from head to foot in a black cloak. The head was bowed and hidden, the whole attitude one of listlessness and dejection. As I looked, there came a long tremulous sigh, and the head drooped lower and lower, as if in a growing hopelessness.