Всадник без головы / The Headless Horseman

“Master Maurice, what is the matter with you?”

“Nothing, Phelim – nothing! What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Why, that whenever you close your eyes and think you are sleeping, you begin palavering! You are always trying to pronounce a big name that appears to have no ending, though it begins with a point!”

“A name! What name?”

“I can’t tell you exactly. It’s too long for me to remember, seeing that my education was entirely neglected. But there’s another name that you put before it; and that I can tell you.

“Ah!” interrupted the young Irishman, evidently not caring to converse longer on the subject. “Some name I may have heard – somewhere, accidentally. One does have such strange ideas in dreams!”

“In your dreams, master, you talk about a girl looking out of a carriage with curtains to it, and telling her to close them against some danger that you are going to save her from.

“I wonder what puts such nonsense into my head? But come! You forget that I haven’t tasted food since morning. What have you got?”

“There’s only the cold venison and the corn-bread. If you like I’ll put the venison in the pot”.

“Yes, do so. I can wait.”

Phelim was about stepping outside, when a growl from Tara, accompanied by a start, and followed by a rush across the floor, caused the servitor to approach the door with a certain degree of caution.

The individual, who had thus freely presented himself in front of the mustanger’s cabin, was as unlike either of its occupants, as one from the other.

He stood fall six feet high, in a pair of tall boots, fabricated out of tanned alligator skin. A deerskin undershirt, without any other, covered his breast and shoulders; over which was a “blanket coat,” that had once been green. He was equipped in the style of a backwoods hunter. There was no embroidery upon his coarse clothing.

The individual was apparently about fifty years of age, with a complexion inclining to dark, and features that, at first sight, exhibited a grave aspect.

It was Zebulon Stump, or “Old Zeb Stump,” as he was better known to the very limited circle of his acquaintances.

“Kentuckian, by birth and raising,”—as he would have described himself, if asked the country of his nativity.