But once the great city was behind us, I gave him his will
and away we went headlong into the wind, the clatter of his galloping
hoofs drowned in the universal uproar. But fast as he sped, the demon
of doubt and suspicion and growing dread kept pace, and for once,
riding Wildfire, I forgot Wildfire and all else save the hell within
me.
A black-bodied chaise picked out in yellow!
And now came the rain to lash me and I bared my head the better to
feel it. Before me in the swirling dark were twinkling lights lurching
rapidly nearer, and down upon me loomed a stagecoach, a mountainous
shape that flitted by me like a phantom. A phantom? The very night
seemed peopled by phantoms; I sped past phantom wains and waggons,
piled high with phantom loads, that moved with no sound of hoofs or
wheels; spectral horsemen flitted by, soundless; in the shadow of
hissing hedgerow and raving, wind-tossed trees crawled miserable,
nebulous shapes, seen but to be lost again, swallowed in the howling
murk.
Rushing wind and lashing rain; pale gleams of a fitful moon to show
swaying trees that tossed wild arms to heaven, and a splashing quag
below, mud and wind-swept pools, all lost again in the swirling dark.
And buffeted thus, beaten by rain, smitten by unseen things, gasping
in the wind's fierce gusts, my one thought was:
A black-bodied chaise with red wheels--Captain Danby!
How long I galloped at this wild and reckless pace I do not know, but
little by little I became aware that the rain had ceased, the clouds
were rent asunder and the moon looked down, pale and remote, upon a
desolate countryside very ghostly and unreal and wholly unfamiliar.
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