Leaving the bed of the stream, the two men entered a pine wood, dim and fragrant and easy to thread.

The moon rose higher, and the light fell in wide shafts between trees that stood well apart, with no vines to grapple one to another or undergrowth to press about their knees.
There needed no watchfulness: the ground was smooth, the light was fair; no motion save the pale flicker of the fireflies, no sound save the sigh of the night wind in the boughs that were so high overhead.

Master and man, riding slowly and steadily onward through a wood that seemed interminably the same, came at last to think of other things than the road which they were traveling.

Their hands lost grasp upon the reins, and their eyes, ceasing to glance now here, now there, gazed steadfastly down the gray and dreamlike vista before them, and saw no longer hole and branch, moonlight and the white scars that the axe had made for guidance.
The vision of the slave was of supper at the quarters, of the scraping of the fiddle in the red firelight, of the dancing and the singing.

The white man saw, at first, only a girl's face, shy and innocent,--the face of the woodland maid who had fired his fancy, who was drawing him through the wilderness back to the cabin in the valley.