w. I got a lot out of it the season
before last, and we ought to get something good to-day."

Keeping well under cover of the hedges the two moved quickly along.
Then, as they neared the wood, with a "whirr" that made both start, away
went a cock-pheasant from the hedge-row they were following--springing
right from under their feet. Another and another, and yet another
winging away in straight powerful flight, uttering a loud alarmed
cackle, and below, the white scuts of rabbits scampering for the burrows
in the dry ditch which skirted the covert.

"Confound those beastly birds! What a row they kick up!" whispered
Haviland wrathfully as he watched the brilliantly plumaged cocks
disappearing among the dark tree tops in front. "Come along, though. I
expect it's all right."

"There you are," he went on disgustedly, as they stood in the ride
formed by the enclosing hedge of the first line of trees. "`Trespassers
will be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law.' Nice free
country this, eh, Cetchy?"

The notice board, nailed some seven or eight feet from the ground,
stared them in the face. But Haviland was used to such.

Cautiously, noiselessly, they stole in and out among the trees, one eye
and ear keenly alert for that which they sought, the other for
indication of possible human, and therefore hostile, presence. The
shower had ceased, but the odour of newly watered herbage hung moist
upon the air, mingling with the scent of the firs, and the fungus-like
exhalations of rotten and mouldering wood. A semi-twilight prevailed,
the effect of the heavy foliage, and the cloud-veiled and lowering sky--
and the ghostly silence was emphasised rather than disturbed every now
and then by the sudden flap-flap of a wood-pigeon's wings, or the
stealthy rustle in the undergrowth as a rabbit or pheasant scuttled
away.

"Look, Cetchy," whispered Haviland. "This is the place where they found
the chap hanging."

Right in the heart of the wood they were, and at this spot two ridges
intersected each other. A great oak limb reached across this point like
a huge natural gallows beam.

"The fellow who found him," went on Haviland, pointing at this, "did so
by accident. He was coming along the ride here in the dark, and the
chap's legs--the chap who was hanging, you know--sort of kicked him in
the face as he walked underneath that bough. Then he looked up and saw
what it was. Ugh! I say, Cetchy, supposing that sort of