with palpitating heart, Dick began to move in the direction of the
noise, for he realised that either there was open water or a canal-like
passage across the bog, which someone was passing through in a boat.

Dick paused again to listen, but there could be no mistake, the sounds
were too familiar, and with voice husky with excitement he put his hand
to his mouth and uttered a loud hail.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.

A STARTLING SCENE.

To Dick Winthorpe's great surprise there was no answer to his cry, and
raising his voice again he shouted: "Who's that? Help!"

His voice sounded wild and strange to him out there in that waste,
closed in as he was by the darkness, and as he listened he could not
repress a shudder, for everything now had become so silent that it was
terrible. Away to his left there was the faint glow of light--very
faint now--but everywhere else darkness, and all around him now a dead
silence. His cry had seemed to alarm every moving creature in the fen,
and it had crouched down, or dived, or in some way hidden itself, so
that there was neither rustle of body passing through the reeds, splash
of foot in the mire, nor beat of pinion in the air. He looked around
him half in awe for the strange lights which he had seen gliding here
and there like moths of lambent fire, but they too had disappeared, and
startling as had been the noise he had heard, the silence seemed now so
terrible that he turned cold.

"What a coward I am!" he said to himself at last. "What is there to be
afraid about?"

He shouted again, and felt more uneasy, for as his voice died away all
seemed more silent than ever, and he drew in a long hissing breath as he
gazed vainly in the direction from which the splashing had seemed to
come.

For quite half an hour all was perfectly still, but he did not move,
partly from an intense desire to be certain, partly, it must be
confessed, from a feeling of dread which oppressed him.

Then there was a rustle and a splash from somewhere behind him, such a
noise as a bird might make. Directly after there came from a distance
the scuttering noise made by a duck dabbling its bill in the ooze, and
this was followed by a low _quawk_ uttered by some nocturnal bird,
perhaps by one of the butterbumps whose hoarse booming cry had come so
strangely in the earlier part of the night.

As if these were signals to indicate to the animal life of the fen that
all was right, sound after sound arose such a