His eyes had mechanically fallen to the ground again, as if he half expected to find in some other waif a hint or corroboration of his imaginings.

Thus abstracted, the figure of a young girl on horseback, in the road directly before the bushes he emerged from, appeared to have sprung directly from the ground.
"Oh, come here, please do; quick!" Cass stared, and then moved hesitatingly toward her.
"I heard some one coming through the bushes, and I waited," she went on.

"Come quick.

It's something too awful for anything." In spite of this appalling introduction, Cass could not but notice that the voice, although hurried and excited, was by no means agitated or frightened; that the eyes which looked into his sparkled with a certain kind of pleased curiosity.
"It was just here," she went on vivaciously, "just here that I went into the bush and cut a switch for my mare,--and,"-- leading him along at a brisk trot by her side,--"just here, look, see! this is what I found." It was scarcely thirty feet from the road.

The only object that met Cass's eye was a man's stiff, tall hat, lying emptily and vacantly in the grass.