oon, but it was
obscured. By the time the rocks which marked the entrance to the poort
came into view it was already night.

Two ways branched here--one his ordinary way home, the other that which
Hans Vermaak had urged him to take. Some twenty feet down, at the
bottom of a precipitous slope, was the river bed, dry save for a
shallow, stagnant reach here and there. Which way should he take? Now
was the time to decide.

"Get on, Aasvogel, you fool! Ah, would you, then?"

This to his horse, accompanied by a sharp rowelling with each heel. For
the animal had stopped short with a suddenness calculated to unseat and
certainly irritate the rider, and was backing and shying like the
panic-stricken idiot it was; the cause of all this fluster being a white
stone standing almost vertically up from the roadside, in the gloom
looking for all the world like the traditional ghost.

"Whigge--whirr!" Something hummed through the air, and that so near he
could feel the draught. Two jets of flame had darted forth from the
hillside above, simultaneously with a dry, double crack. Two more
followed, but had it been a hundred Colvin was utterly powerless to
investigate, for his horse, which had already sprung forward beneath the
sharp dig of the spurs, now took to wild and frantic flight, and for
some moments was completely out of hand. By the time he got it in hand
again he had been carried a good mile from the scene of this startling
though not wholly unexpected occurrence.

Two things came into Colvin's mind, as eventually he reined in his
panting, snorting steed. One of the bullets, at any rate, had missed
him very narrowly, but by just the distance the animal had backed when
shying from the ghostly object which had scared it; and but for the fact
of his being a first-rate rider the suddenness of the bolt would have
unseated him, and he would now be lying in the road at the mercy of his
would-be assassins. But--where was Gert?

He looked around. The clouds had parted a little and the moon was
visible through a rift thus formed; indeed it was the sudden flash of
the moonlight upon the white stone that had so terrified the horse at
first. The light revealed the mountain slopes rising up around, but of
his servant there was no sign. He listened intently. No sound, save
the creaking of the saddle, caused by the violently heaving flanks of
his panting steed, and now and again a mutter of distant thunder away up
in the m