Всадник без головы / The Headless Horseman

Come on!”

Once more they are stretching their teams along a travelled road – where a half-score[4 - half-score – десять] of wheeled vehicles must have passed before them. And not long before: the hoof-prints of the animals fresh as if made within the hour. A train of waggons, not unlike their own, must have passed over the burnt prairie!

Like themselves, it could only be going towards the Leona. In that case they have only to keep in the same track.

For a mile or more the waggon-tracks are followed. The countenance of Cassius Calhoun, for a while wearing a confident look, gradually becomes clouded. It assumes the profoundest expression of despondency, on discovering that the four-and-forty wheel-tracks he is following, have been made by ten Pittsburgh waggons, and a carriole – the same that are now following him, and in whose company he has been travelling all the way from the Gulf of Matagorda!

***

Beyond doubt, the waggons of Woodley Poindexter were going over ground already traced by the tiring of their wheels.

“Our own tracks!” muttered Calhoun on making the discovery.

“Our own tracks! What mean you, Cassius? You don’t say we’ve been travelling—”

“On our own tracks. I do, uncle; that very thing. That’s the very hill we went down as we left our last stopping place. We’ve made a couple of miles for nothing.

Embarrassment is no longer the only expression upon the face of the speaker. It has deepened to chagrin, with an admixture of shame. He feels it keenly as the carriole comes up, and bright eyes become witnesses of his discomfiture.

There is a general halt, succeeded by an animated conversation among the white men. The situation is serious: the planter himself believes it to be so. He cannot that day reach the end of his journey – a thing upon which he had set his mind.

How are they to find their way?

Calhoun no longer volunteers to point out the path.

A ten minutes’ discussion terminates in nothing. No one can suggest a feasible plan of proceeding.

Another ten minutes is spent in the midst of moral and physical gloom. Then, as if by a benignant mandate from heaven, does cheerfulness resume its sway.