o bed.

XVIII

SPADEADAM WASTE

About eleven o'clock next morning Foster stopped at the top of a hill
and sitting down on a broken wall lighted his pipe. In front, the
undulating military road ran straight across the high tableland to the
west. To the south, a deep hollow, the bottom of which he could not
see, marked the course of the Tyne. Plumes of smoke rose out of the
valley and trailed languidly across the sky, for the river flowed past
well-cultivated fields, old-fashioned villages, and rows of sooty
cottages that clustered round pithead towers. Human activity had set
its stamp upon the sheltered dale, alike in scenes of quiet pastoral
beauty and industrial ugliness.

It was different to the north, where the shaggy moors rolled back in
bleak, dark ridges. There were no white farmsteads here; one looked
across a lonely waste that had sheltered the wolf and the lurking Pict
when the Romans manned the Wall, and long afterwards offered a refuge
to outlaws and cattle thieves. Foster's way led through this
desolation, but his map indicated a road of a kind that ran north to
the head of Liddel. He must decide whether he should take it or plunge
into the wilds.

Since Graham was in front of him, he had probably gone to Liddesdale,
with the object of finding if Foster was at the Garth. If he did not
come back by the road he had taken, he would watch the railway that
roughly followed it across the moors from Hexham, which seemed to close
the latter to Foster and make it dangerous for him to go near the Garth
at all. Nevertheless he meant to see Alice before he looked for Daly,
and he turned to Pete.

"On the whole, I'd sooner keep off the road. Is there a way across the
heath to the upper Liddel?"

"I wouldna' say there's a way," Pete answered with a dry smile. "But I
can take ye ower the Spadeadam waste, if ye do not mind the soft flows
and some verra rough traiveling. Then I'll no' promise that we'll win
farther than Bewcastle to-night, an' if there's much water in the
burns, we'll maybe no' get there."

They struck across a rushy field, crept through a ragged hedge, and
came out upon rough pasture that gradually merged into the heath. A
green bank and a straggling line of stones, some fallen in large masses
and some standing two or three feet high, presently stretched across
their path, and Foster stopped for a few moments. The bank and
moat-like hollow he looked down upon marked the _vallu