The time was the year of grace 1779; the locality, Morristown, NewJersey.
It was bitterly cold. A northeasterly wind had been stiffening the mudof the morning's thaw into a rigid record of that day's wayfaring onthe Baskingridge road. The hoof-prints of cavalry, the deep ruts leftby baggage-wagons, and the deeper channels worn by artillery, lay starkand cold in the waning light of an April day. There were icicles onthe fences, a rime of silver on the windward bark of maples, andoccasional bare spots on the rocky protuberances of the road, as ifNature had worn herself out at the knees and elbows through longwaiting for the tardy spring. A few leaves disinterred by the thawbecame crisp again, and rustled in the wind, making the summer a thingso remote that all human hope and conjecture fled before them.
Here and there the wayside fences and walls were broken down ordismantled; and beyond them fields of snow downtrodden and discolored,and strewn with fragments of leather, camp equipage, harness, andcast-off clothing, showed traces of the recent encampment andcongregation of men. On some there were still standing the ruins ofrudely constructed cabins, or the semblance of fortification equallyrude and incomplete. A fox stealing along a half-filled ditch, a wolfslinking behind an earthwork, typified the human abandonment anddesolation.
One by one the faint sunset tints faded from the sky; the far-offcrests of the Orange hills grew darker; the nearer files of pines onthe Whatnong Mountain became a mere black background; and, with thecoming-on of night, came too an icy silence that seemed to stiffen andarrest the very wind itself. The crisp leaves no longer rustled; thewaving whips of alder and willow snapped no longer; the icicles nolonger dropped a cold fruitage from barren branch and spray; and theroadside trees relapsed into stony quiet, so that the sound of horse'shoofs breaking through the thin, dull, lustreless films of ice thatpatched the furrowed road, might have been heard by the nearestContinental picket a mile away.
Either a knowledge of this, or the difficulties of the road, evidentlyirritated the viewless horseman. Long before he became visible, hisvoice was heard in half-suppressed objurgation of the road, of hisbeast, of the country folk, and the country generally. "Steady, youjade!" "Jump, you devil, jump!" "Curse the road, and the beggarlyfarmers that durst not mend it!" And then the moving bulk of horse andrider suddenly arose above the hill, floundered and splashed, and thenas suddenly disappeared, and the rattling hoof-beats ceased.
The stranger had turned into a deserted lane still cushioned withuntrodden snow. A stone wall on one hand—in better keeping andcondition than the boundary monuments of the outlying fields—bespokeprotection and exclusiveness. Half-way up the lane the rider checkedhis speed, and, dismounting, tied his horse to a wayside sapling. Thisdone, he went cautiously forward toward the end of the lane, and afarm-house from whose gable window a light twinkled through thedeepening night. Suddenly he stopped, hesitated, and uttered