The guide of the expedition pushed his mule forward at a fast walk, making no excuses to Griswold and Habersham for the roughness of the trails he chose, nor troubling to give warning of sharp turns where a horse, being less wise than a mule, tobogganed madly before finding a foothold. Occasionally a low hanging limb switched the associate professor sharply across the face, but his temper continued serene where the trail was darkest and steepest, and he found himself ignoring Habersham's occasional polite questions about the university in his effort to summon up in memory certain ways of Barbara Osborne which baffled him. He deplored the time he had given to the study of a stupid profession like the law, when, if he had applied himself with equal diligence to poetry, he might have made for himself a place at least as high in belles-lettres. In his college days he had sometimes thrummed a guitar, and there was a little song in his heart, half formed, and with only a line or two as yet tangible, which he felt sure he could write down on paper if it were not that the bugles summoned him to war; it was a song of a white rose which a lover wore in his heart, through winter and summer, and it never changed, and the flight of the seasons had no manner of effect on it.
"Check up, cain't you?" snarled the man on the mule, laying hold of Griswold's rein; and thus halted, Griswold found that they had been circling round a curiously symmetrical, thickly wooded hill, and had finally come to a clearing whence they were able to gaze far off toward the north.
"We are almost out of bounds," said Habersham, pointing. "Over there somewhere, across the hills, lies North Carolina. I am as thoroughly lost as you can possibly be; but these men know where they are. How far is it, Billy"--he addressed the silent guide--"to Mount Nebo?"
"About four mile, and I reckon we'd better let out a leetle now or they'll sing the doxology before we git thar."
"What's that light away off there?" asked Habersham.
The guide paused to examine it, and the faint glow far down the vale seemed to perplex him. He spoke to one or two other natives and they viewed the light ruminatively, as is their way.
"Thet must be on Ardmore's land," said the leader finally. "It shoots out all sorts o' ways round hyeh, and I reckon thet's about wheh Raccoon Creek cuts through."