the little cabin toward the woods back of the clearing; but went ahead, breaking the trail for her with his snowshoes. He moved forward slowly; he could travel, if he had wished, three feet to every two that she could cover, but he seemed not wishing for speed but rather for delay. They reached the trees; the hemlock and pine, black and swaying, shifted their shadows on the moonlit snow; bare maples and beeches, bent by the gale, creaked and cracked; now the hemlock was heavier. The wind, which wailed among the branches of the maples, hissed loudly in the needles of the hemlocks; snow swept from the slopes and whirled and drove about them, and she sucked it in with her breath. All through the wood were noises; a moaning came from a dark copse of pine and hemlock to their right, rose and died away; a wail followed—a whining, whimpering wail—so like the crying of a child that it startled her. Shadows seemed to detach themselves, as the trees swayed, to tumble from the boughs and scurry over the snow; they hid, as one looked at them, then darted on and hid behind the tree trunks.
Henry was barely moving; now he slowed still more. A deep, dull resonance was booming above the wood; it boomed again and ran into a rhythm. No longer was it above; at least it was not only above; it was all about them—here, there, to right and to left, before, behind—the booming of the Drum. Doom was the substance of that sound of the Drum beating the roll of the dead. Could there be abiding in the wood a consciousness which counted that roll? Constance fought the mad feeling that it brought. The sound must have some natural cause, she repeated to herself—waves washing in some strange conformation of the ice caves
