Darkness piled itself
against darkness, but with a difference to one who knew all the
undulations of this bluff and just where it ended in the sheer
fall which gave a turn to the road at the farther end of the
bridge.
But it was not upon the mass of undistinguishable tree-tops or the
line they made against the sky that his gaze lingered. It was on
something more material; something which rose from the brow of the
hill in stark and curious outline not explainable in itself, but
clear enough to one who had seen its shape by daylight. Judge
Ostrander had thus seen it many times in the past, and knew just
where to look for the one remaining chimney and solitary gable of
a house struck many years before by lightning and left a grinning
shell to mock the eye of all who walked this path or crossed this
bridge.
Black amid blackness, with just the contrast of its straight lines
to the curve of natural objects about it, it commanded the bluff,
summoning up memories of an evil race cut short in a moment by an
outraged Providence, and Judge Ostrander marking it, found himself
muttering aloud as he dragged himself slowly away: "Why should
Time, so destructive elsewhere, leave one stone upon another of
this accursed ruin?"
Alas! Heaven has no answer for such questions.
When he had reached the middle of the bridge, he stopped short to
look back at Dark Hollow and utter in a smothered groan, which
would not be repressed, a name which by all the rights of the spot
should have been Algernon's, but was not.
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