One sight he feared most of all,--a bronzed arm with a wide silver bracelet at the wrist, the hand clutching and waving before him heavy strands of long, yellow hair with a gory patch at the end,--living hair that writhed and undulated to catch the light, coiling about the arm like a golden serpent.
His way lay through the Meadows, yet he hardly realised this until he was fairly on the ground in the midst of a thousand evil signs of the day.

Here, a year after, were skulls and whitening bones, some in heaps, some scattered through the sage-brush where the wolves had left them.
Many of the skulls were pierced with bullet-holes, shattered as by heavy blows, or cleft as with a sharp-edged weapon.

Even more terrifying than these were certain traces caught here and there on the low scrub oaks along the way,--children's sunbonnets; shreds of coarse lace, muslin, and calico; a child's shoe, the tattered sleeve of a woman's dress--all faded, dead, whipped by the wind.
He pressed through it all with set jaws, trying to keep his eyes fixed upon the ground beyond his horse's head; but his ears were at the mercy of the cries that rang from every thicket.
Once out of it, he rode hard, for it must not come yet--his first night alone.

By dusk he had reached the new settlement of Amalon, a little off the main road in a valley of the Pine Mountains.

Here he sought the house where he had left the child.